Against the backdrop of COP28, this paper investigates the impact of intergovernmental fiscal transfers (IGFT) on climate change commitments in India. Within the analytical framework of environmental federalism, we tested the evidence for the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) using a panel model...

During the COVID-19 pandemic the US federal government appropriated $189.5 billion in emergency aid to school districts. These funds were supplied to help districts replace lost revenues and to mitigate the harmful effects of the pandemic on learning and other measures of district performance....

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government's second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg as...

Ensuring effective governance of local budgets is critical for public service delivery and sustainable development. Public audit institutions-including internal auditors and independent supreme audit bodies-are hypothesized to enhance local budget effectiveness by promoting transparency,...

Even now, 35 years after German unification, the economic power and fiscal capacity of the eastern German federal states remain below average. In Germany's system of fiscal federalism, this leads to substantial financial transfers, a fact that repeatedly triggers political debate. Thereby, the...

What instruments can governments deploy to prevent fiscal crises in decentralized fiscal systems? This analysis reveals that good public sector institutions, controls by the central government over local fiscal balances and borrowing, and intergovernmental transfers could be effective...

We explore the efficiency of alternate allocations of responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions pricing policies in a small open economy federation. Emissions result from consumption and production of a tradeable dirty good, and their intensity depends on the emissions technology. National...

This paper aims to test the hypothesis of the existence of significant tax competition between communes, which mainly concerns the share of value-added tax (VAT) proceeds, by exploring the system for allocating intergovernmental transfers in Morocco and analyzing the determinants of VAT...

We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

This paper investigates the causal effects of central-to-local government transfers on local economic activity in Ecuador, utilizing exogenous variation from a reform in the intergovernmental transfer formula implemented in 2018. Addressing gaps in the fiscal decentralization literature, this...

This document serves as a guidance for MSCA beneficiaries for the management of the special needs requests submitted in the framework of the running Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe MSCA grant agreements. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) pay particular attention to physical accessibility...

Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising approach to machine learning (ML) by allowing multiple sources of data (devices or entities) to collaboratively train a shared model while keeping data decentralised. This approach mitigates privacy risks as raw data remains locally on the sources,...

This paper proposes that spatial policies improve economic outcomes by reducing barriers to supplying labour, with heterogeneous effects across demographic groups. Using quasi-experimental variation in Germany's fiscal transfer system, we estimate higher employment elasticities for female...

Although reassignment of policy instruments among governments in many federations is a recurring event, there is no widely accepted, positive model of the phenomenon. This stands in contrast to the well established body of work on the normative theory of the efficient federal assignment. In this...

This paper analyzes how (local) tax havens function. Using the German municipal business tax setting as a laboratory, I investigate the characteristics and emergence of local tax havens. I demonstrate that local tax havens are situated in close proximity to large agglomeration areas, while...

In many decentralized countries, local tax rates are set by local governments but are simultaneously linked to tax schedules that are determined by superior governments. In such systems, a change to the tax schedule by a superior level of government creates a vertical tax externality and affects...

Ethiopia’s interregional fiscal arrangements entail a sizable redistribution of resources. They help the objective of income redistribution and equity, as well as providing partial insurance against regional macroeconomic shocks. However, overall transfers from the federal government to...

In any system for funding local government, there are inherent trade-offs between competing policy objectives. We have discussed these at length in a recent report (Phillips, 2024), and in our submission to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) December 2024...