Most contemporary decentralization has occurred at the local (district) rather than regional (provincial) level. Why? We advance a theory highlighting the political incentives of central authorities to bypass the regional tier of government in favor decentralizing to smaller, more fragmented...

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a simple theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency...

In the last decade Italy has experienced a gradual process of fiscal decentralization. The reforms implemented in past years changed the structure of the Italian system of public finance substantially. Until the beginning of the '90s the local governments were responsible for important sectors...

Recent literature suggests that administrative fragmentation can be politically motived. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the determinants of administrative fragmentation at the subnational level of a unitary country- Bangladesh. The study conducts a panel data analysis...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether Spanish municipalities adjust in response to budget shocks and (if so) which elements of the budget they are more likely to adjust. The methodology we use to answer these questions is a vector error-correction model (VECM), estimated with data from a...

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a simple theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether Spanish municipalities adjust in response to budget shocks and (if so) which elements of the budget they are more likely to adjust. The methodology we use to answer these questions is a vector error-correction model (VECM), estimated with data from a...

This paper lays a foundation by reviewing the issues and the comparative dimensions of fiscal decentralisation in four subject countries - Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. It is divided into the following components. First, it briefly reviews the issues: the main points of the economic...

This article considers the future of financialisation as it is entwined with that of cities. It poses the question of how cities can regulate financialisation. ‘Financialization’ is understood here to encompass the myriad of social, economic, legal and political dimensions of the transition...

Local government law has fallen behind the times. Over the past two decades, economists have developed a deep understanding of 'agglomeration economics,' or the study of how and why mobile citizens and firms locate in cities. Their work argues that people decide to move to cities because of the...