The demand for high quality detailed public finance statistics covering a globally representative sample of countries has increased dramatically during the recent financial crisis. Due to the complexity of public finance statistics, however, such data tend to be either available in...

Dealers in over-the-counter securities form networks to mitigate search frictions. The audit trail for municipal bonds shows the dealer network has a core-periphery structure. Central dealers are more efficient at matching buyers and sellers than peripheral dealers, which shortens intermediation...

Donor aid organizations (DAOs) are multi-layered and multi-dimensional bureaucracies with many departments trying to find solutions to problems for countries, investing staff resources and effort into having an effect. A department may come into conflict with other departments because of...

In 1990, the government of India issued a national guideline to all states to adopt Joint Forest Management (JFM) to achieve better resource conservation through partnerships between Forest Department (FD) and Forest Protection Committee (FPC)s which consists of local villagers. While JFM has...

This paper deals with the open issue about the choice between centralized or decentralized public procurement policy. This is not an easy task since many factors have to be taken into account. We discuss them systematically underling how they act on the two procurement organizational structures...

The Local Authorities Transfer Fund (LATF) is one of the funds that the Kenyan Government has decentralized to local authorities to supplement the financing of service delivery, enhance financial management and accountability, as well as reduce debts accumulated by the authorities. The purpose...

Debt can be rewarding in cases of moderate use, but can be disastrous in cases of imprudence. Excessive debt has been a key challenge to Kenyan local authorities, constraining service delivery and undermining financial sustainability. The Government established and decentralized the Local...

All over the world, recent legislative reforms share the goal of increasing fiscal autonomy of lower tiers of governments. The aim of this policy is to reduce vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) and enhance the efficiency in the provision of public services, via increased accountability of local...

I develop and test two competing models assessing the impacts of targeted government transfers on a local incumbent’s electoral performance. I take advantage of the randomized roll-out of a large-scale Conditional Cash Transfer program in the Philippines, which offers an ideal setting to test...