End of the line: The Effects of Intergovernmental Grants on Local Revenue: Evidence from Chile

This paper presents research on the effect of intergovernmental grants on local government revenue in Chile. Intergovernmental grants are endogenous and I exploit a kink in a component of the Chilean formula for resource distribution for a panel of 340 Chilean municipalities from 1990 to 2007. I find empirical evidence that for Chilean municipalities, intergovernmental grants have a negative effect on local revenue. Specifically, an increase in per capita grant amount of one standard deviation is associated with a decrease of between 0.25 and 0.32 standard deviations in local per capita revenue. This effect is not uniform for different kinds of local revenue.