An extensive literature analyses the impact of upper-tier transfers on the spending behaviour of lower level governments. According to the median voter framework, a transfer from the centre should act as a lump sum grant to residents and thus be spent by jurisdictions in the same proportion as...

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility are smaller, because the...

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita....

Fiscal rules, i.e., constraints to the policymaking discretion of elected officials in terms of deficit and expenditures, are widely used tools to regulate fiscal policies. This paper shows that they can negatively affect the quality of candidates willing to run for office. We build a simple...

This paper studies the impact of politicians' education on policy choices and public finance. A probabilistic voting model with candidates' education level and public expenditure decomposition is used to explain how politician's education matters for policy decisions over public budget...

This paper analyzes the role of local spending, particularly on social welfare, and local inequality as factors in the Italian political crisis following the adoption in 2011 of more radical national austerity measures. We employ two different methods. First, we develop an original database of...

We analyze the distribution of central transfers to municipal governments for the period between the 1993 and the 2005 electoral reforms using a panel of Italian municipalities. We find evidence that being the birth town of a Member of Parliament results in an increase in yearly transfers per...

Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

The aim of this paper is to present a further contribution, with panel data, to the analysis of absolute convergence ( and ), associated with the neoclassical theory, and conditional, associated with endogenous growth theory, of the sectoral productivity at regional level. Presenting some...

The paper aims at analysing the impact of territorial capital endowment on the economic growth process measured by exports and employment growth for the 103 italian provinces over the period 1999-2011. A broader concept of territorial capital has been used (Camagni, 2008) which takes into...