At just under £8 billion, spending on schools and childcare is the second-largest area of public service spending in Scotland, behind spending on health. While councils rather than the Scottish Government itself determine how much to spend on schools, they do so in the context of a funding and...

"In recent years, urban policy-makers have been urged to adopt the development of urban policies for shrinking cities from an urban management perspective. However, urban management in shrinking cities is a difficult problem because it is fiscally restrictive compared with cities with growing...

The UK government is consulting on significant reforms to how funding from central government is allocated between English councils. From 2026-27, there will be a new system for allocating funding between councils, which will take account of new official assessments of councils' spending needs...

English councils saw big cuts to their funding during the 2010s, with spending on some services down between 40% and 70% over the decade. And although like virtually all public services, funding for local government was increased during the 2019-24 parliament, councils' finances are still under...

Like spending on the NHS, and schools, English council funding has increased over the current parliament. But that follows a decade of austerity in the 2010s. And despite funding increases, councils are again under significant financial pressure, with increases in spending outpacing revenues and...

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government’s second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg...

Do young politicians prioritize other types of municipal spending than old politicians? We study this question using hand-collected candidate-level data on municipal elections (1996-2020), along with detailed administrative data on municipal spending in Bavaria. Our identification strategy makes...

Do bigger legislatures lead to bigger government? We exploit a Brazilian reform that allocated the number of municipal council seats based on population thresholds in a regression discontinuity design. We find that larger councils have significantly higher public expenditures on social goods and...

Do elected politicians use public money differently depending on their ideology? When is partisanship most apparent during a mandate? The existing literature is mixed. Based on a regression discontinuity design, I show that political color significantly impacts public spending in French...

This paper provides evidence of the role of spillovers in the efficiency of French municipalities. These spillovers are apprehended through four levels of municipal equipment and we investigate municipal efficiency changes both for cities including a certain amount of equipment and for cities...

Natural resource revenues contribute to sustainable development when they are reinvested sufficiently in public services, such as education, that offer long-term social returns. Cross-country evidence suggests that resource-rich countries fail at this, spending less on public services than...

We use the synthetic control method to analyze the impact of the transfer of administrative works on public welfare expenses, using the transition from an ordinary city to a core city, which is one of the designated statuses under the metropolitan system in Japan. Our results suggest that the...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

This paper aims to examine whether the status of fiscal decentralization generates efficiency in local spending behavior and leads to local fiscal performance and local economic growth, revealing not only the status of Romania from the point of vertical fiscal imbalance but also the fiscal...

Efficiency of education expenditure is the ability to maximize the educational achievement given the resources invested. Although public education expenditure tends to increase, yet this does not necessarily guarantee high quality of education services. This study aims to assess public education...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government's ability to observe it and...

While there is a new and rapidly growing literature on the effects of climatic factors on economic and social outcomes, little research has been conducted to understand the fiscal impact of weather, especially at the sub-state level. Using data from Massachusetts municipalities from 1990 through...

We investigate the effect on municipality spending efficiency of a local property tax reform, which reduced in 2008 the upper limit of the property tax. We compute municipality efficiency scores via data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 2005 to 2011, and then we rely in a panel data set to...

Luisa Dörr prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in February 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of three distinct empirical essays...

In this paper we examine how Finnish municipalities' expenditures depend on the share of citizens with foreign background out of the total population. Empirical analyses make use of Finnish panel data from 295 municipalities and 202 migrant nationalities for the period 1987- 2018. It turns out...

This study examines how the quality of public administration influenced local economic growth in Vietnam from 2011 to 2019. Based on previous studies, we evaluate this impact through the Cobb-Douglas function includes government capital, thereby examining both the individual and interactive...

Starting in 2001 the Government of Indonesia employed the Regional Autonomy Law, providing larger fiscal role to the province and district governments. However, our understanding of its impacts on development in Indonesia is still limited. This paper seeks to find the relationship between...

Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end...