We analyze the voting behavior of a small committee that has to approve or reject a project proposal whose return is uncertain. Members have diverse preferences: some of them want to maximize the expected value, while others have a bias towards project approval and ignore their information on...

Decentralisation and Reform in Latin America analyses the process of intergovernmental reform in Latin America in the last two decades and presents a number of emerging issues. These include the impacts of decentralization and the response of countries in the region to challenge such as social...

We study a policy aimed at increasing the level of information on medical malpractice costs and the risk exposure of local public healthcare providers. The policy is based on enhanced monitoring of medical malpractice claims by the level of government that rules providers in a multilevel...

The paper analyzes how institutional elements affect the decision to file of risk neutral agents. In particular, we introduce an objective probability of winning given by the combination of a precedent-weight parameter (defining the type of legal system) and a transparency factor. 603,000...

This paper is an empirical survey on both the provision and the funding of childcare services in Italy. To this purpose, national financial laws, regional laws as well as Italian municipalities’ budgets are analyzed. First of all we describe the funding mechanism of the service pointing out...

In this article, we study the extent to which decisions by the Spanish Constitutional Court are explained by political variables. Our theory proposes that party alignment should play an important role in explaining the behavior of the Spanish constitutional judges, but with some limitations...