This dissertation asks the question to what extent functional policy-making authority allocations determine the applying of successful policy instruments by local governments in optimising their ability to provide local public goods given system specific transaction costs. I will develop a model to formulate the contextual relations and the behavioral uncertainties related to the employment of ...

Though fiscal policies of central governments sometimes provide modest insurance against regional income shocks, this paper shows that pro-cyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm these stabilizing effects. We examine the cyclicality of budget items among provincial governments in eight federations, showing that own-source taxes are highly pro-cyclical and contra...

The theoretical literature on common pool problems in fiscal policy suggests that government fragmentation increases public expenditures. In parliamentary regimes, the fragmentation hypothesis refers to (i) coalition governments and (ii) cabinet size. This paper explores the effect of coalition governments and cabinet size on public expenditures with panel data covering all 16 German States ove...

This paper offers additional insights on the interactions between economics and politics in Portugal. We use an unexplored data set consisting of monthly polls on vote intentions for the main political parties in Portugal, since 1986. Results indicate that: (1) socialist governments had less electoral support than social democratic governments; (2) social democratic governments enjoyed a honeym...

The paper focuses on the strict relation between the continuous changes of the diversified tax regimes of the various types of cooperatives and the political composition of the governments succeeding each other in Italy from the after war period to the present. It emerged that the different types of cooperatives prevailing in the leftwing League of Cooperatives or in the Confederation of Italia...

Governments have slowly started to exploit the potentials that social media offer for their external communications. The related work reveals a quite diverse picture both in governments’ quality of social media maintenance as well as in the interaction with citizens. Our aim in this study is to understand the factors that drive governments’ decisions to use social media for their external commu...

Although fiscal policies of central governments sometimes provide modest insurance against regional income shocks, this paper shows that procyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm these stabilizing effects. We examine the cyclicality of budget items among provincial governments in seven federations, showing that own-source taxes are generally highly procyclical,...

We introduce incomplete information to a multiparty election under proportional representation: each voter knows her preferences and votes strategically to maximize her payoffs, but is uncertain about the number and the preferences of the other voters. Parties are assumed to be purely office motivated and, hence, the resulting governments are always minimum winning. In this framework we prove a...

Scholars often assert that intra-state competition increases the ability of firms to extract tax abatements by playing local governments off of one another. We test this proposition using data on the more than 5,000 tax abatement agreements signed in Ohio between 1983 and 2004 under its enterprise zone program. We articulate a political economic model of tax abatement generosity that models the...

this paper discusses e-government, in particular the challenges that face adoption of e-government in Saudi Arabia. In this research we define e-government as a matrix of stakeholders: governments to governments, governments to business and governments to citizens, using information and communications technology to deliver and consume services. egovernment services still face many challenges in...