This paper aims to examine whether the status of fiscal decentralization generates efficiency in local spending behavior and leads to local fiscal performance and local economic growth, revealing not only the status of Romania from the point of vertical fiscal imbalance but also the fiscal...

Do elected politicians use public money differently depending on their ideology? When is partisanship most apparent during a mandate? The existing literature is mixed. Based on a regression discontinuity design, I show that political color significantly impacts public spending in French...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

We use the synthetic control method to analyze the impact of the transfer of administrative works on public welfare expenses, using the transition from an ordinary city to a core city, which is one of the designated statuses under the metropolitan system in Japan. Our results suggest that the...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

We investigate the effect on municipality spending efficiency of a local property tax reform, which reduced in 2008 the upper limit of the property tax. We compute municipality efficiency scores via data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 2005 to 2011, and then we rely in a panel data set to...

In this paper we examine how Finnish municipalities' expenditures depend on the share of citizens with foreign background out of the total population. Empirical analyses make use of Finnish panel data from 295 municipalities and 202 migrant nationalities for the period 1987- 2018. It turns out...

This study examines how the quality of public administration influenced local economic growth in Vietnam from 2011 to 2019. Based on previous studies, we evaluate this impact through the Cobb-Douglas function includes government capital, thereby examining both the individual and interactive...

While there is a new and rapidly growing literature on the effects of climatic factors on economic and social outcomes, little research has been conducted to understand the fiscal impact of weather, especially at the sub-state level. Using data from Massachusetts municipalities from 1990 through...

The deteriorating fiscal position of municipalities across the United States raises the question which adjustment mechanisms municipalities have at their disposal and what their effects are. We utilize quasi-experimental variation in the year of property tax assessments in the state of...

This paper studies the financing of local public projects. The setting is a community with durable housing, undeveloped land available for new homes, and population turnover. The community invests in a public project that may be financed with a mix of a tax on current residents and a debt issue....

We use the synthetic control method to analyze the impact of the transfer of administrative works on public welfare expenses, using the transition from an ordinary city to a core city, which is one of the designated statuses under the metropolitan system in Japan. Our results suggest that the...

Cities are increasingly hold accountable for climate action. By demonstrating their pro-environmentality through own climate-related activities, they not at least aspire to encourage individual climate protection efforts. Based on standard economic theory there is little reason to assume that...

Saudi Arabia experience structural economic changes embodied by Vision 2030. One of the main aspects of this master plan is related to the financial markets and developing its instruments. This paper is devoted to developing new financial instrument called Municipality Sukuk (MuSk), and bring it...

While there is a new and rapidly growing literature on the effects of climatic factors on economic and social outcomes, little research has been conducted to understand the fiscal impact of weather, especially at the sub-state level. Using data from Massachusetts municipalities from 1990 through...

Luisa Dörr prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The study was completed in February 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of three distinct empirical essays...

Municipalities provide infrastructure and essential services financed by taxes and debt. We develop a model of municipal capital structure, defined as the debt-to-investment ratio, that rests on two primary economic forces: the elasticity of the tax base with respect to taxes and services, and...

Starting in 2001 the Government of Indonesia employed the Regional Autonomy Law, providing larger fiscal role to the province and district governments. However, our understanding of its impacts on development in Indonesia is still limited. This paper seeks to find the relationship between...

This paper explores which variables are more significant in municipal executive recommendation by citizens. We estimated the influence of public dimensions, such as municipe loyalty, municipe satisfaction, and municipe perceived value in municipal executive recommendation by citizens. Then, we...

We study the fiscal and tax response to intergovernmental grants, exploiting quasi-experimental variation within Germany’s fiscal equalization scheme triggered by Census revisions of official population counts. Municipal budgets do not adjust instantly. Instead, spending and investments adapt...

We study the fiscal and tax response to intergovernmental grants, exploiting quasi-experimental variation within Germany's fiscal equalization scheme triggered by Census revisions of official population counts. Municipal budgets do not adjust instantly. Instead, spending and investments adapt...

Despite widespread concern and discussion, no consensus exists concerning the causes of the "infrastructure crisis." We investigate several models of the determination of local public capital expenditures. Using Euler equation methods, we find that the hypothesis that construction spending is...

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...

Do state and local governments smooth their consumption spending across years, or is their spending driven mainly by contemporaneous changes in resources? We design a test to determine which view of state and local spending is more consistent with the data. We find that state and local spending...

When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments; federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this...

Around the turn of the century, Southern blacks lost the right to vote and discrimination against them by local government officials intensified. This paper argues that, in the case of the de jure segregated public schools attended by black children, the ability of Southern blacks to ''vote with...

This paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends, by lessening local information spill-overs, to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto-correlation among local government...

Audits are a common mechanism used by governments to monitor public spending. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness of auditing with theory and empirics. In our model, the value of audits depends on both the underlying presence of abuse and the government's ability to observe it and...