Within the context of reigniting post crisis macroeconomic growth, income inequality has emerged as a topic of significant interest for both academics and policymakers (Bastagli, Coady, and Gupta, 2012) This study builds on past literature on fiscal decentralization suggesting that...

The paper provides an analysis of the determinants of health spending differentials among the Italian Regions for the years 1998-2010. An original standardised spending framework is proposed that takes into account the appropriateness of the services provided and price/technical efficiency, as...

Like a number of other states, Oregon has been hampered in its pension reform efforts since 1996 by its state supreme court's embrace of the “California Rule,” a doctrine arising, in Oregon's case, from a misunderstanding of federal Contract Clause precedent. Under the misreading, states...

In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we...

Equal educational opportunity is a core American value. Yet many children of low-income or minority racial or ethnic status attend public schools that are lower quality compared with those that white children or high-income children attend. And data indicate that, on average, low-income or...

This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects local services. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by replacing government transfers with revenues from a local property tax. Our identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the...

The current system of federalism undermines the social and economic equality of the people of the United States. Although states have broad responsibilities to provide basic services, they have vastly different financial capacities. Some states are richer while others are poorer, and these...

Local governments often set up inter-municipal consortia to provide public services jointly, rather than individually. The main benefits of joint provision include the potential for improved cost-effectiveness arising from gains from economies of scale and the internalization of costs and/or...

Many industrialized countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms assigning more competences and spending responsibilities to sub-national governments. In this paper we investigate what leads to the decentralization of different categories of public expenditure in 19...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...