Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

Over the last period of fifteen years, fiscal decentralisation has been one of the main topics of the Italian economic policy. The system of sub-national government finance has undergone substantial changes especially with the 2001 constitutional reform. The paper examines the recent spending...

The paper presents a series of arguments and elaborations questioning the present Italian political attitude of seeing large civil works, specially within the transport sector, as indispensable public expenditures for objectives of economic development. In particular it is presented the rather...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' ’and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...