This paper studies whether the centralization of public school finance affects school revenue levels. The theoretical framework indicates that centralization has price and income effects on the pivotal voter's demand for school revenue, but the overall effect is ambiguous. A public school...

This paper proposes that spatial policies improve economic outcomes by reducing barriers to supplying labour, with heterogeneous effects across demographic groups. Using quasi-experimental variation in Germany's fiscal transfer system, we estimate higher employment elasticities for female...

Although reassignment of policy instruments among governments in many federations is a recurring event, there is no widely accepted, positive model of the phenomenon. This stands in contrast to the well established body of work on the normative theory of the efficient federal assignment. In this...

This paper investigates the causal effects of central-to-local government transfers on local economic activity in Ecuador, utilizing exogenous variation from a reform in the intergovernmental transfer formula implemented in 2018. Addressing gaps in the fiscal decentralization literature, this...