We investigate whether politicians award intergovernmental grants to core supporters. Our new dataset contains information on discretionary project grants from a German state government to municipalities over the period 2008-2011. The results show that discretionary grants were awarded to...

We study how partisan alignment across levels of government affects coalition formation and government stability using a regression discontinuity design and a large dataset of Spanish municipal elections. We document a positive effect of alignment on both government formation and stability....

Fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental fiscal relations reform have become nearly ubiquitous in developing countries. Performance, however, has often been disappointing in terms of both policy formulation and outcomes. The dynamics underlying these results have been poorly researched....

This paper estimates causal effects of intergovernmental grant effects on expenditures and tax revenues of all municipalities and cities in the Philippines over the period 1993–2016. This is done by firstly utilizing a rule-based grant distribution scheme. Second, we apply an instrumental...

States are financing a larger share of capital investment by school districts but little is known about district response to facility aid programs. This paper addresses this gap by examining how a short-term increase in the matching rate for the Building Aid program in New York affected district...

This paper develops a framework that distributes reductions in state aid based on underlying local fiscal health. Under this framework, the state gives smaller aid cuts to communities that are in worse underlying fiscal health and receive less existing aid. This framework therefore provides a...

We test the hypothesis that the flypaper effect can arise if the recipient government finances part of its expenditures with a distortionary tax. We present a simple theoretical framework that shows how a lump-sum transfer stimulates the marginal expenditures of a recipient government through an...

Motivated by recent disasters, this paper analyzes the risk sharing aspect in a federation. The regions can be hit by a shock leading to losses that occur with an exogenous probability and in a stochastically independent way. The regions can spend effort on self-insurance to reduce the size of...

Motivated by recent disasters, this paper analyzes the risk sharing aspect in a federation. The regions can be hit by a shock leading to losses that occur with an exogenous probability and in a stochastically independent way. The regions can spend effort on selfinsurance to reduce the size of...

We study the strategic incentives of regional governments to allocate their budget to public investment and to public consumption expenditures against the background of an incentive-compatible redistribution policy set by the central government. Regional investment changes the productivity...