This paper focuses on the question of how income inequality between two jurisdictions impacts upon government decision-making affecting the size of the public sector. We model policy choices as the outcome of regional representatives'negotiations in the legislature. We show that the more unequal...

This paper focuses on the choice of centralization of public policy in an economy with two government levels. It argues that centralization by subsidiarity principle stresses a conflicting interest between different jurisdictions instead of working it out. The extent of the conflict of interest...

Two well-known mechanisms for enhancing managers' accountability are yardstick competition and internal monitoring. Yardstick competition puts managers in direct competition when firms make decisions for re-appointment (Tirole, 2006). Monitoring is used by firms to detect managers' rent-seeking...

Vertical integration in an environment without foreclosure, or more generally without any mechanisms that restrict competition among firms, and subsidization of firms' production are two separate mechanisms that raise consumer welfare, and both have been proposed as antidotes to certain aspects...

This paper studies the interplay between the wage gap and government spending in a small open economy facing a shock in trade policy. We consider a specific factor model with an export sector, which uses skilled labour, and an import-competing sector, which uses unskilled labour. We find the...

This paper studies the interplay between the wage gap and government spending in a small open economy facing a shock in trade policy. We consider a specific factor model with an export sector, which uses skilled labour, and an import-competing sector, which uses unskilled labour. We find the...

This paper assesses the effects of intermunicipal cooperation on public procurement (PP) performance, based on the Italian experience. We estimate a fixed effect regression model using a sample of 50,905 Italian public works contracts awarded both by municipalities and by municipal unions (MU)...

The aim of this paper is to improve on the model by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) by developing a non-linear model (that leads to interior rather than corner solutions) and by taking into account that different levels of income imply different reactions of fair-minded people. We suggest to modify the...

The aim of this article is to report on an experiment in publishing an open access journal and learn from it about the larger field of open access publishing. The experiment is the launch of the European Journal of Comparative Economics (EJCE), an on-line refereed and open access journal,...

This paper is part of a wider research on South-East Asia countries' taxation carried on under the supervision of. V. Tanzi. India is a federal republic and a big, highly populated and poor country, which however since some years has entered the catching up stage of development and shows...