While electoral accountability should be stronger when responsibilities are clearly assigned to one political office, the involvement of higher tiers of government is often associated with policies specifically designed to improve local accountability. This paper investigates the impact of...

This paper sets out a simple dynamic probabilistic voting model in which a government allocates a fixed budget across electoral districts that differ in their loyalty to the ruling party. The model predicts that the geographic pattern of spending depends on the way the government balances...

En choisissant Le Québec économique 2009 comme titre, nous ouvrions volontairement la voie à une analyse en deux temps. D'une part, nous souhaitions évaluer l'économie québécoise en mesurant le chemin qu'elle a parcouru au cours des dernières décennies jusqu'à aujourd'hui. D'autre...

This document offers a synthesis of the papers presented at the Conference on the Econometrics of Education: Modeling Selectivity and Outcomes, held at CIRANO, April 26 and 27, 2002. The papers serve as a pretext to draw a non exhaustive survey of the state of research in the economics of...

The paper examines the evolution of the inequality of family income in Canada during the 1986-1996 period. Our main objective is to understand why overall market income inequality rose, while that of disposable income did not. To analyze this question, we use data from the Survey of Consumer...

Decentralization reforms typically lead to the coexistence of multiple tiers of government in a given policy area. To analyze the welfare effects of such partial decentralization, this paper develops a political agency model in which two levels of government are involved in public good provision...

Decentralization of expenditure responsibilities from central to local governments is generally thought to increase overall government accountability by bringing the policymaking process closer to citizens. In practice, decentralization reforms tend to be partial in nature, leading to the...

Because they yield durable and visible benefits to voters, public infrastructure expenditures are an attractive instrument for politicians to build enduring electoral support in their constituencies. Static models of special-interest politics typically predict that public spending should be...