Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements in metropolitan France in 2008. Spending efficiency is measured using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)...

Methods In this retrospective diagnostic validation study of 547 patients admitted in our institute between January 2012 and December 2012, we excluded patients with end stage renal disease (clearance < 15mL / min / 1.73m2) or dialyzed, solitary kidney or nephrectomy, lack of data. Serum creatinine (Cr) and Ph were measured preoperatively and postoperatively specifically (H0, H12, H24, H48, H72...

This paper analyzes a Tiebout / tax-competition model, where heterogeneity of consumer preferences is introduced into a standard tax-competition framework. Following the modern Tiebout tradition, consumer sorting in the model is achieved through the activities of profit-maximizing community developers. Once sorting is achieved, the equilibrium is equivalent to that in a standard tax-competition...

This paper investigates the evolution of expenditure inequality in Indonesia during 1999-2008, a period that coincides greatly with the implementation of fiscal decentralisation policy. In general, the results show increasing expenditure inequality evident in a decreasing share of income in the bottom 10 percent, and an increasing share in the top 10 percent. Further examination employing the t...

State governments contract with health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to coordinate medical care for nearly 20 million Medicaid recipients. Identifying the causal effect of HMO enrollment on government spending and health care quality is difficult if, as is often the case, recipients have the option to enroll in a plan. To estimate the average effect of HMO enrollment, this paper exploits cou...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a large U.S. training organization which is divided in about 50 independent pools of training agencies. The number and the size of the agencies within each pool vary greatly. Each pool distributes performance incentive awards to the training agencies it supervises, subject to two constraints: the awards cannot be negative and the sum of the awar...

Unlike the federal government, most state governments in the U.S. formally operate under statutory or constitutional constraints which limit their ability to run budget deficits and resort to debt financing. A priori, one would expect to find evidence in favor of an intertemporally balanced budget, or fiscal sustainability, among states, especially those that are characterized by a high degree ...

A commonly alleged pitfall of decentralization is that poverty, socio-economic inequality and lack of political competition allow local elites to capture local governments. This hypothesis is empirically examined using a longitudinal sample of 89 West Bengal villages concerning targeting of credit, agricultural input kits, employment programs and fiscal grants spanning the period 1978–98. Highe...

This paper studies the provision of incentives in a large U.S. training organization which is divided in about 50 independent pools of training agencies. The number and the size of the agencies within each pool vary greatly. Each pool distributes performance incentive awards to the training agencies it supervises, subject to two constraints: the awards cannot be negative and the sum of the awar...