The aim of this paper is to track the location decisions of knowledge-intense firms in a redeveloped urban district in the city of Barcelona in which government policy has promoted the formation of a cluster of knowledge-based activities. After decades of economic and industrial stagnation in a district called Poblenou,...

In this paper, we analyse the role of mobility in tax and subsidy competition. Our primary result is that increasing ‘relocation’ mobility of firms leads to increasing ‘net’ tax revenues under fairly weak conditions. While enhanced relocation mobility intensifies tax competition, it weakens subsidy competition. The resulting fall in the...

We identify exogenous variation in incumbent policymakers’ re-election probabilities and explore empirically how this variation affects their investments in physical capital. Our results indicate that a higher re-election probability leads to higher investments, particularly in the purposes preferred more strongly by the incumbents. This aligns with a theoretical framework where...

This paper proposes an approach to measure efficiency of a set of units operating in an administrative public service, namely real estate cadastral offices, which have not been analysed previously. This study has been made possible thanks to the database provided by the Directorate General of Real Estate Cadastral Assessment...

This paper looks at a county’s central government optimal policy in a setting where its two identical local regions compete for the attraction of footloose multinationals to their sites, and where the considered multinationals strictly prefer this country to the rest of the world. For the sake of reality the...

While electoral accountability should be stronger when responsibilities are clearly assigned to one political office, the involvement of higher tiers of government is often associated with policies specifically designed to improve local accountability. This paper investigates the impact of centralization on local electoral accountability in the context of California’s school...