The aim of this paper is to test if electoral systems and human development are linked. Using high quality data and very simple panel data econometric techniques, we show that electoral systems play a critical role in explaining the difference in the levels of human development between...

In the robust statistics literature, a wide variety of models have been devel- oped to cope with outliers in a rather large number of scenarios. Nevertheless, a recurrent problem for the empirical implementation of these estimators is that optimization algorithms generally do not perform well...

F35, F22, C23 </AbstractSection> Copyright Ugarte Ontiveros and Verardi; licensee Springer. 2012

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction in the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal tolerable size of government has...