When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments; federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this...

This paper analyzes the role of Thin-Capitalization rules for capital structure choice and investment decisions of multinationals. A theoretical analysis shows that the imposition of such rules tends to affect not only the leverage and the level of investment but also their tax-sensitivity. An...

Political parties play an important role in structuring political competition at different levels of governance in the European Union (EU). The political parties that contest national elections also participate in the EU legislative institutions, with the governing parties at the national level...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that municipalities aligned with upper-tier grantor governments (i.e., controlled by the same party) will receive more grants than those that are unaligned. We use a rich Spanish database, which provides information on grants received by nearly 900...

The goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage through a combination of mandates, subsidies, marketplaces, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to examine...

This paper examines the impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – which substantially increased insurance coverage through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and Medicaid expansions – on behaviors related to future health risks after three years. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor...

Employer-provided health benefits for workers who retire before age 65 has fallen over the last decade. We examine a cohort of male workers from the Health and Retirement Survey to explore the dynamics of retiree health benefits and the relationship between retiree health benefits and retirement...