This paper examines the role of political alignment and the electoral business cycle on municipality revenues in Greece for the period 2003-2010. A panel dataset combining local and national elections with local budgets is used to run a fixed-effects econometric model. The findings suggest that...

It is widely believed that politicians allocate public resources in ways to maximize political gains. But what is less clear is whether this comes at a cost to welfare; and if so, whether alternative electoral rules can help reduce these costs. In this paper, we address both of these questions by...