We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

The theory of fiscal federalism suggests that debt of subcentral levels of government is closely related to the internal organization of the country, defined through intergovernmental fiscal relations. Due to a great importance of subcentral levels of government in the theory and practice of...