Stabilising the financial health of local governments, as well as restructuring their financing system gained increased attention in recent years both in Hungary and abroad. This increased attention should be emphasised on account of two reasons. Firstly, the financialeconomic rippling effect of...

This paper deals with Russia’s market for municipal and sub-federal borrowings.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of fiscal decentralization on subcentral governments’ budgetary discipline according to the evidence of case studies of ten countries that have significantly different institutional environments. Before analysing the case studies, we systematize...

Norwegian local governments that violate the balanced budget rule (BBR) are placed in a register. The consequence of being in the register is that the budget and resolutions to raise new loans must be approved by the county governor, the central government's representative in the county. Local...

The implications of delegating fiscal decision making power to sub-national governments has become an area of significant interest over the past two decades, in the expectation that these reforms will lead to better and more efficient provision of public goods and services. The move towards...

In many federal countries, local governments run large deficits, even when supervision by state authorities is tight. I investigate whether party alignment of mayors and supervisors influences local government borrowing. The dataset includes 427 local German governments over the period...

Formal fiscal rules have been introduced in many countries throughout the world. While most studies focus on intra]jurisdictional effects of fiscal rules, vertical impacts on the finances of other levels of governments have yet to be explored thoroughly. The paper investigates the influence of...

Using a sample of the 48 mainland U.S. states for the period 1973-2009, we study the ability of U.S. states to expand own state employment through the use of state deficit policies. The analysis allows for the facts that U.S. states are part of a wider monetary and economic union with free...

This paper studies with disaggregated budget data how expenditures, revenues, and borrowing evolve in municipalities that receive bailouts. It asks whether higher-level governments enforce austerity measures after bailing out indebted municipalities. The sample consists of 421 municipalities in...

Despite strongly equalized per capita revenue and similar budgetary institutions, fiscal performance is increasingly diverging across German federal states. Given that state and local governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this paper investigates whether the composition of...