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...

In this paper we analyze the effects of both tactical and programmatic politics on the inter-regional allocation of infrastructure investment. We use a panel of data for the Spanish electoral districts during the period 1964-2004 to estimate an equation where investment depends both on economic and political variables. The results...

This article argues that the consequences of the ‘fragmentation’ of the European patent system are more dramatic than the mere prohibitive costs of maintaining a patent in force in many jurisdictions. The prevalence of national jurisdictions, which are highly heterogeneous in their costs and practices, over the validity and enforcement...

I consider a two-party parliamentary election where parties compete on a quality (or valence) dimension. First I motivate why in such an election a voter may decide to cast a blank vote. Second I define a new voting system, inspired in the standard proportional representation system, where the percentage of...

Data envelopment analysis and panel data stochastic frontier models are used to evaluate the impact of the 1995 renewal of regional political institutions and the 1998 tax reform (introduction of IRAP) on the efficiency of Italian regional governments. Both methodologies are applied to a longitudinal dataset, including financial and health...

This paper derives the optimal pension and tax parameters in a society where individuals differ in two characteristics: rationality and productivity. Rational agents, if not liquidity constrained, smooth consumption over their life-cycle. Myopic agents, by contrast, have ex ante a strong preference for the present and undertake no savings, even...