We investigate whether “corporatist” wage setting and policy making institutions negatively affect a) the slope of the growth path of the economy, by yielding decisions that resist the introduction of technological progress; b) the position of the growth path, through higher transaction...

This paper extends the empirical literature about the effects of fiscal decentralization on the growth of government along three dimensions. It distinguishes between the effects of the level of decentralization from the way local governments finance their expenditures (common pool versus own...

Expert contributors in economics and political science offer a comprehensive breakdown of the issue of local jurisdiction fragmentation and provide recommendations for successful policy reform. Topics discussed include economies of scale, the costs and benefits of voluntary and forced...

We investigate whether corporatist governance negatively affects growth: a) directly through higher transaction costs involved in the policy decision making process; b) indirectly, yielding growth retarding policy decisions. We construct a more accurate data set for 18 OECD countries in the...

The paper assesses the relative explanatory power of the Keynesian, the optimal finance, the contingent liability and several public choice theories of the determinants of public deficits on Italian 1950-1998 data. A vector error correction model suggests that deficits are sensitive to...

This article proposes refined econometric estimates of effective marginal income tax rates for 23 OECD countries from 1951 to 1990. Panel regressions find such measures negatively correlated with economic growth. These results are consistent with endogenous growth theories and opposite to those...