This paper discusses how electoral politics shapes the regional allocation of public investment expenditures per capita in Greece. Using regional public investment data for 10 political periods (1975-2009), combined with electoral data by constituency, a model is proposed which captures the...

The paper examines the fiscal impacts, and the associated welfare cost, of marginal reforms to work-related tax relief in five European countries. We combine a theoretical model of labour supply with micro-simulation results from an EU-wide model, which allows us to capture the interaction...

There are theoretical arguments supporting the view that regional income inequalities, the degree of fiscal decentralization and the quality of government are simultaneously determined. To the extent that previous work has considered feedback effects between them, it has done so through...

The literature has largely shown that social fragmentation is negatively correlated with the quality of government. Surprisingly, fragmentation has been omitted in most influential cross-sectional studies of turnout, and when it has been included evidence is, at best, mixed. Using aggregated...

One of the most important decisions that governments face is how to allocate the public resources necessary for development, given each country’s budget constraints. According to the literature on the links between wealth and institutional performance, highly kleptocratic countries are...

This paper explores the impact of decentralization on countries’ fiscal outcomes paying attention to one aspect usually neglected in the literature: the relevance of self-interested local politics. Relevance that can be proxied by the nationalization of political party systems, namely the...

We analyse the role played by fiscal equalisation schemes in determining sub-national borrowing. We test econometrically the link between the regional government primary fiscal balances and the GDP per capita in Canada, Germany and Spain. We find that either poor or rich regions can display...

This paper examines the Stackelberg equilibrium for public input competition and compares it with the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. Given two asymmetric regions, we show that under the Nash equilibrium, the more productive region tends to spend more on public input, which results in this...

This paper studies the provision of public inputs in a federal system with unit taxation on labor. We use a model with vertical tax and expenditure externalities to analyze the e¢ ciency of equilibria under di¤erent settings, particularly Nash and Stackelberg equilibria. Our results discuss...

This paper provides a theoretical framework which integrates the conventional methodology for measuring the productive efficiency and the monetary assessment of social welfare changes associated with public sector performance. Two equivalent measures of social welfare changes generated by an...