The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9...

We utilize county-level data to explore growth determination in the U.S. and possible heterogeneity in growth determination across individual states. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. We use a consistent two stage least squares...

Globalization has a concrete territorial expression, with remaining regional asymmetries. Writers in growth and development are far away to achieve consensus about the underpinning reasons of heterogeneity in regional performance. This constitutes an important regional policy issue. This paper...

Recent empirical evidence, from countries in the European Union in particular, are much more ambiguous on the costs savings from private production of local public services than previous literature used to be. In this paper, an explanatory model of factors driving costs in solid waste collection...

Does there exist a connection between the political power and the tax administration? In this paper, we offer empirical evidence from Spain that there exists. First, the Spanish regional tax administration is not immune to the budgetary situation of the regional government, and tends to exert a...

In the absence of an equalization grant system, like we justify occurs in Spain at the local level of government, those governments that bear a decrease in their level of tax capacity will have to adjust their budget either by increasing their level of tax effort, by reducing their level of...

The dynamic fiscal policy adjustment of local jurisdictions is investigated empirically using a panel of more than 1000 U.S.~municipalities over a quarter of a century. Distinguishing own revenue, grants, expenditures, and debt service, the analysis is carried out using a vector error-correction...

Collusion and soft budget constraint are two conspicuous phenomena in transition economies¡¯ banking system. Literature has separately investigated those two phenomena from theoretical point of views. However, the cross-point of both phenomena has been neglected in the research of banking...

This paper contributes to providing insights into the impact of decentralisation on poverty. It starts out with an overview of which role decentralisation plays in strategies and policies for poverty eradication and derives economic and political impact channels. It concentrates on the economic...