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...

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...

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...

In this article we study the role of inter-regional externalities of public goods, equity, and electoral competition in determining the budget of the central government on local public goods. The main results of the paper are: first, our model predicts that the federal budget on local public...

We study the consequences of franchise extension and ballot reform for the size of government in Western Europe between 1820 and 1913. We find that franchise extension exhibits a U-shaped association with revenue per capita and a positive association with spending per capita. Instrumental...

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...

In this paper, we employ a portfolio approach based on a two-country world to study the impact of financial openness on the size of government and on other key economic variables, including the consumption-wealth ratio, the growth rate of wealth, and welfare (assuming that public spending is...

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...