Strategic interaction in local tax setting is motivated with yardstick competition only when the fiscal decision influences the incumbents’ probability of being re-elected. Most of the previous analyses draw conclusions on yardstick competition without estimating this link or failing to find...

Theoretical developments in political economy analyses of intergovernmental transfers identify several factors previously ignored in the empirical literature and emphasize the importance of institutional details. Combined, these two developments create a degrees of freedom problem and make cross...

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...

Tests of the relationship between budget rules and fiscal performance are metric sensitive and arbitrary in the evaluation of the stringency of the rules, in the aggregation of these evaluations in an index and in the imposition of a linearly specified model. We propose a nonlinear principal...

In Italy, the Regular Grant is the most important subsidy to private cultural institutions. Since 1996, law 534/96 has regulated its provision. This law greatly improves on the previous legislation, as it redefines the prerequisites to become a recipient and specifies performance indicators 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...

Which programmes of income redistribution across jurisdictions are likely to be chosen in democratic countries and why? How does the degree of government centralization affect these choices? How does redistribution of income across regions interact with the migration of factors of production? Do...