A wide range of services provided by the public sector are credence goods, i.e., services for which the producer has private information whether a certain treatment is needed or not. This paper studies how ownership affects the incentives for producers to reveal such information to public...

We try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics, relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system. A Downsian model of electoral competition and forward-looking voting indicates that majoritarian - as opposed to proportional -...

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

There´s a consensus in the Uruguayan historiography about the important increase of the state intervention in economic and social issues during the long period of political dominance of Batllismo (1903-1933). However, the studies of this phenomenon have not discriminated sufficiently between...

Although LEEs are meant to be self-sustaining, if not revenue-generating units, many of them actually incur losses on a continuing basis. Current practice in many LGUs does not engender a clear appreciation of the true cost of the local economic enterprise. COA has documented many cases where...

Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public’s monitoring ability. Still, weak fiscal autonomy can undermine voters’...

An examination of how increased turnover among legislators in the fifty U.S. states affects fiscal policy and economic growth finds that it makes legislators short-sighted. Turnover increases the size of government by increasing the shares of both total spending and taxes in income. In...

Institutions are common predictors of voter turnout. Most research in this field focuses on cross-country comparisons of voting systems, like the impact of compulsory voting or registration systems. Fewer efforts have been devoted to understand the role of local institutions and their impact on...

There are several theoretical accounts of public sector outsourcing. We note that leading theories give different predictions of the influence of political variables and test the predictions on a Swedish data set in which outsourcing varies between municipalities and over time as well as between...

Will autocratic governments implement policies to satisfy the people’s demands in order to prevent large scale social unrest? This paper explores this question through quantitatively analysis of the political economy of public goods provision in Chinese provinces. I collected data on the...