In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints, while leaving state-owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose-built dataset for Chinese local public debt. Private firms...

We explore how the vertical structure of direct democracy in a federal context affects expenditure decisions of sub-central governments. In so doing we revisit previous research on the effect of direct democratic institution on public policies. Particularly, the effect of upper-level (state)...

In this paper I investigate whether changes in the availability of direct democratic institutions in local Swiss jurisdictions affect expenditure decentralization. By using a panel-based difference in differences estimation I find a statistically significant reduction in decentralization when...

В статье рассматриваются механизмы обеспечения социальной стабильности по средствам прямого участия граждан в принятии решений по вопросам местного значения....

This study investigates the effects of the provision of costly initiatives on policy efficiency in a laboratory experiment where a policy setter implements a status quo affecting the utility of the constituency. I vary treatments regarding the political institution (either purely representative...

This paper analyzes the importance of governance of international organizations (IOs) to Swiss policy making in the field of education. The focus is on the Bologna Process driven by the European Commission, and the 'Programme for International Student Assessment' (PISA) of the Organization for...

Tools of direct democracy, such as the citizen initiative, are available at both the state and local levels in the United States, yet models of the process typically do not consider these institutions in tandem. In this article, I develop a model of local fiscal policy that incorporates the...

Recent research has identified important policy differences between voter initiative states and pure representative states despite a lack of enough observable voter initiative campaigns to explain the policy differences. This article investigates the indirect effects of the voter initiative...