Just like any other employer, the municipalities can engage participants in active labor market programs in their activities. Does this possibility affect the output of municipal services? In order to answer this question a measure for output of locally provided schooling is created using factor...

In 2007 the Italian central government started a program by transferring funds to regional governments to develop both private and public early childcare services. Exploiting the different timing of program implementation across regions, we evaluate its effectiveness in boosting the public...

Rothenberg and Sanders (2000a) find little support for a Downsian theory of voter participation in the (104th) U.S. House of Representatives. Vote abstentions are common in legislative bodies. In the 2nd session of the 110th United States Senate, for example, the abstention rate was...

The main aim of this paper is to study the European regional disparities in the labour market, considering the regional productive structures and some regional institutional variables. It is widely known that one of the EU's most important stylized facts is the regional disparities among...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

According to the disciplining hypothesis, globalization restrains governments by inducing increased budgetary pressure. As a consequence, governments shift their expenditures in favour of transfers and subsidies and away from capital expenditures. This expenditure shift is potentially enhanced...

The main aim of this paper is to study European regional disparities in unemployment, considering regional productive structures and some regional institutional variables. It is widely known that one most important stylized facts concerning the EU consists in regional disparities among regions....

Using the fixed and random effect panel regression models the paper tries to empirically examine the incentive effects of federal transfers on states’ own-revenue. Per capita resource transfers from the centre are found to be significant and negatively associated with states’...

Abstract: The spatial survival models typically impose frailties, which characterize unobserved heterogeneity, to be spatially correlated. This specification relies highly on a pre-determinate covariance structure of the errors. However, the spatial effect may not only exist in the unobserved...