This study considers the long-run relationship between government expenditure and economic growth for the United Kingdom over the period 1830 to 1993. The causality analysis allows for the effects of exports, and for the presence of complex structural breaks in the data. The results support the...

This paper analyzes the impact of ideology on the size of US state governments. Following Pickering and Rockey (2011) this impact is hypothesized to increase with mean state income. This idea is tested using state-level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional...

Beyond conducting the usual regression analysis of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and aggregate government size (national and subnational combined), this paper makes the first attempt to examine how different fiscal decentralization measures affect the sizes of national and...

In this paper we develop a probabilistic voting model of inter-gov\-ern\-men\-tal transfers to explain the distribution and size of local public goods. We find that: i) The parties’ political competition for votes induces the central government to provide regional transfers that lead to Pareto...

This paper presents a formal model to explore the effect of political competition on government performance relative to the efficient provision of public goods and the size of bureaucracy. In contrast with other arguments that sustain there is a positive relationship between political...

Countries vary widely with respect to the share of government spending on health, a metric that can serve as a proxy for the extent to which health is prioritized by governments. World Health Organization (WHO) data estimate that, in 2011, health's share of aggregate government expenditure in...

The size of government depends positively on the labor share given price-inelastic demand for public services. OECD data support this hypothesis and also show a stronger dependence under left-wing ideology because larger government employs a larger workforce. A permanent one standard deviation...

This paper theorizes that the impact of ideology on the size of US state governments increases with state income. This idea is tested using state-level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional representatives. Empirically the interaction of ideology and mean income...