In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government's second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg as...

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government’s second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg...

Because taxes on lodging are generally not designed to correct market failure, their presumptive purpose is to maximize public revenue; we investigate whether they do so. Using recent estimates of the price elasticity of demand for hotel rooms in ten major U.S. cities, we find that existing tax...