Since 1991, the Italian national government can dissolve municipal councils when infiltration by organized crime is suspected (Law 164/1991). We exploit variation over time and space in the application of this law to study voters' responses to politicians' publicly exposed ties to criminal...

The most painful effect of the Great Recession in European countries has been the surge in unemployment rates during a period that has been characterised most notably by an increase in income inequality and the heterogeneous pattern of this inequality by educational level. Thus, workers with low...

In this paper, we examine the role of the business cycle in divorce. To do so, we use a panel of 29 European countries covering the period from 1991 to 2012. We find the unemployment rate negatively affects the divorce rate, pointing to a pro-cyclical evolution of the divorce rate, even after...

An effective institutional structure is a crucial tool for having a highly functioning education system and consequently, economic growth and development. We analyse the effects of decentralisation and school autonomy on the quality of education in two MENA countries (Jordan and Tunisia), by...

The Korean government has struggled against the proliferation of private tutoring for more than four decades. In 2006, state education authorities imposed a restriction on operating hours of hagwon (private tutoring academies or cram schools) in an attempt at reducing the economic and time...

We estimate the effects of highways on the suburbanization of Spanish cities. First, we extend previous findings for the US and China by providing evidence for Europe: each additional highway ray built between 1991 and 2006 produced a 5 per cent decline in central city population between 1991...

Between 1981 and 1990, Chile began to implement an education reform based on school choice and a financing system through vouchers. In theory, the system ensures complete freedom of choice of school by families. This paper attempts to identify the existence of factors that conditioned the...

In this paper I estimate under-assessment of incomes in the Personal Income Tax during the years following its introduction in Spain. The methodology combines an analysis of discrepancy with National Accounts and an econometric exercise, which follows and slightly modifies the Feldman and...

This paper provides evidence for the causal effect of the highway and railway infrastructure on the suburbanization of population in European cities. We adopt different measures of transportation infrastructure and estimate their joint effects on suburbanization using a two-step panel approach....

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...