Suchergebnisse

This paper examines empirically the strategic interactions among central and subcentral governments when incomplete information forces the subcentral government to form expectations about the amount of transfers that it will receive from the central one. The empirical analysis features a wide array of proxies for transfer expectations and uses an autoregressive modeling technique to estimate them on a sample of 20 Italian Regions for the 1995-2009 time interval. The analysis shows that transfer expectations are a quantitatively important component of local government spending, revealing evidence of soft budget spending behavior. Adapted from the source document.

This presidential address assesses the crisis of the Downsian model of political competition in light of the mounting evidence on policy divergence and evaluates the possibility that the new theories of politicians' quality and political selection provide an alternative theoretical conceptualization of political competition. Based on a critical review of the literature and on the author's works on content analysis of policy speeches, income redistribution, politicians' quality, and political legislation cycles, this address concludes that multidimensional Downsian models of political competition are adequate to explain policy divergence and points out the serious theoretical and empirical problems that models of political selection have to solve. Adapted from the source document.

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 country samples less meaningful. This paper circumvents these problems by examining an Italian regional panel that minimizes the set of institutional conditioning factors and is large enough to examine a comprehensive set of explanatory variables. The estimates confirm the relevance of most political determinants and of standard economic and socio-demographic determinants of interregional redistribution. Differences in type of expenditures and intergovernmental relations are also considered. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]