In economics, the local knowledge advantage is arguably one of the key arguments in favor of decentralizing the public sector. However, empirical investigations of this particular effect have been scarce. This paper tests the existence of the local knowledge advantage in a real-world setting....

The aim of the paper is to explicitly disentangle the role of political and cultural boundaries as factors of fragmentation of economies within large countries. On the one hand, local protectionism plays a substantial role in many federations and decentralized states. On the other hand, if the...

This article uses the informal governance framework to elucidate the connection between regime transition and participation in regional international organizations (IOs). In particular, this study focuses on non-democratic regional IOs and examines the empirical case of the Commonwealth of...

The paper investigates the impact of historical legacies of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires on demand for litigation in contemporary Romania in criminal cases. It finds that nowadays a key difference between these two historical zones is that in the Habsburg counties demand for litigation...

This paper develops a model to explain how sub-national political regimes affect the variation in retention rates in a country in which a region and a central government bilaterally bargain over the distribution of tax revenue given a particular tax rate (and thus fiscal decentralization is...

The differentiation in the impact of resources on economic growth is often explained by the specifics of institutional factors. The aim of this paper is to investigate how sub-national political differences influence the effect of natural resources on economic growth. Using a dataset of Russian...