While decentralization of fiscal responsibilities is one of the main objectives that has emerged in the agenda of national governments and international organizations, there is little empirical evidence of the potential benefits of this intervention. This paper is an attempt to fill, in part, the void of quantitative measurement. Using panel data on infant mortality rates, GDP per capita, and t...

An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result, aid should be expected to affect fiscal behaviour, although theory and existing evidence is ambiguous regarding the nature of these effects. This paper applies techniques developed in the ‘macroeconometrics’ literature to estimate the dynamic linkages between aid and fiscal aggregates. Vector...

James Edwin Kee, Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration The George Washington University Abstract The last decade has seen a renewed interest in the concept of fiscal decentralization or fiscal federalism. This comes after a half-century of fiscal centralization in most developed and developing nations. This paper examines the theory behind fiscal decentralization and suggests the...

The international oil companies (IOCs) in Nigeria have expressed concern over the federal government’s intention to change the laws governing the oil and gas industry including the fiscal terms. They claim that the proposed fiscal terms will affect their bottom line and trigger uncertainties in their investments in the upstream sector. Therefore, this research was conducted with the aim of eval...

Stress assignment to polysyllabic words is the only aspect of the pronunciation of written Italian that cannot be predicted by rule. It could be a function of stress dominance in the language or of stress neighborhood (i.e., the number of words sharing an ending and a stress pattern). In two experiments, we investigated stress assignment in Italian adult and, most importantly, young readers. Wo...

How should fiscal policy be conducted in the presence of default risk? We address this question using a sovereign default model with nominal rigidities. An increase in government spending during a recession stimulates economic activity and reduces unemployment. Because the government lacks commitment to future debt repayments, expansionary fiscal policy increases sovereign spreads, making the f...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be important information to incorporate into a fiscal incidence analysis. The directional mobility literature ...

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our preliminary results suggest that more equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of fiscal transparency and increases in fiscal transparency during t...

This project examines fiscal reforms in Brazil since the 1990s, particularly in taxation, budgeting, and fiscal federalism. While recentralizing fiscal authority and massively expanding the extractive capacity of the state, policymakers chose not to revamp an inefficient tax system that has nonetheless proven capable of generating high levels of revenue. In budgeting, the economic crises of the...

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy rules in a fiscal federation, such as the European Union. The focus of the analysis is the interaction between the fiscal policy of member countries (regions) and the monetary authority. Each of the countries structures its fiscal policy (spending and taxes) with the interests of its citizens in mind. When capital markets are integrated, the fis...