Building partnerships is becoming an important issue at the local level of government in many countries. Different experiences can be traced throughout Europe, as well as in other OECD countries. This is because partnerships, especially when the size of the single local government is small, can...

The recent uprisings in the Middle East have cast doubt on the degree to which existing theories of autocracy can correctly identify which groups threaten the autocrats rule at any given time. As a result, these theories are unable to predict fundamental upheavals in established autocracies. Who...

The paper investigates the impact of an electoral support for president for short- and long-term transfers between national and provincial governments in tutelary regimes. The research uses the case of Iran; the database covers 330 observations for 30/31 provinces for 2005-2015. The results show...

States use local-option taxes to promote local revenue diversification and improve local fiscal health. However, many sub-state governments wait a long time before adopting local-option taxes or do not adopt them at all, which seems puzzling or even irrational upon first glance. This paper uses...

This paper estimates the average effect of regulatory intensity and administrative redtape on productivity and innovation. For this purpose we exploit the exogenous variation of the decentralization process that has taken place in Spain during the last three decades. Using objective proxies for...

From the perspective of redistributing income from rich to poor, equalizing intergovernmental grants are bound to have some perverse effects. For such grants, although transfering income from wealthy to poor on average, will inevitably result in some income transfers from poor individuals who...

From the perspective of redistributing income from rich to poor, equalizing intergovernmental grants are bound to have some perverse effects. For such grants, although transfering income from wealthy to poor on average, will inevitably result in some income transfers from poor individuals who...

The thesis consists of an introductory part and three self-contained papers. <p> Paper [I] studies the determinants of the differences in expenditure on services for functionally impaired individuals among municipalities in Sweden. A spatial autoregressive model is used in order to test whether the...</p>