Ascertaining whether local election results are driven by incumbents’ performance while in office or mechanically reflect constituencies’ ideological affiliation and macroeconomic conditions is crucial for evaluating the alleged accountability-enhancing property of decentralization. Based on...

This paper models theoretically and investigates empirically the consequences on local economic performance of state mandates on financially distressed authorities. In particular, I analyze the switch from systematic state bailout of regional health care deficits to selectively mandated hikes in...

This paper explores for the first time the consequences of centrally imposed local tax limitations on the modelling and estimation of spatial auto-correlation in local fiscal policies, and compares three spatial interaction estimators: a) the conventional maximum likelihood estimator that...

This paper investigates the impact of tax and public service performance on English local government popularity by using data on local property taxes, service performance ratings and local election results after the introduction of a system of evaluation of local government performance...

This paper investigates whether the production efficiency of Norwegian local governments exhibits a spatial pattern that is compatible with the hy­pothesis of yardstick competition. In order to check whether yardstick com­petition is really responsible far the observed spatial pattern, and to...

While numerous studies analyse the determinants of the level and composition of local public spending, little attention has been given to what shapes the choice of tax instruments used by decentralised governments. This paper bridges this gap by investigating the economic and political...

Based on a unique measure of performance of English local governments in the provision of public services (Comprehensive Performance Assessment, CPA), this paper develops a simple analytical framework that fully encompasses the institutional features of the British system of local government...

Expenditures by local goverments often exhibit positive spatial autocorrelation. A spatial pattern might arise either from an endogenous effect (with local authorities being affected by the average behavior in the neighborhood) or from exogenous/correlated effects(with the behavior of close-by...