This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the US federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of Presidents during the period 1982-2000. Our findings suggest that the distribution of federal outlays to the States is affected by presidential politics. First, presidential elections matter. States that heavily supported the incumbent President in past presidential elections tend to receive more funds, while marginal and swing states are not rewarded. Second, party affiliation also plays an important role since states whose governor has the same political affiliation of the President receive more federal funds, while states opposing the president's party in Congressional elections are penalized. These results show that presidents are engaged in tactical distribution of federal funds and also provide good evidence in support of partisan theories of budget allocation.

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This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the US federal budget allocation to the states. Departing from the existing literature that gives prominence to Congress, we carry on an empirical investigation on the impact of Presidents during the period 1982-2000. Our findings suggest that the distribution of federal outlays to the States is affected by presidential politics. First, presidential elections matter. States that heavily supported the incumbent President in past presidential elections tend to receive more funds, while marginal and swing states are not rewarded. Second, party affiliation also plays an important role since states whose governor has the same political affiliation of the President receive more federal funds, while states opposing the president's party in Congressional elections are penalized. These results show that presidents are engaged in tactical distribution of federal funds and also provide good evidence in support of partisan theories of budget allocation.

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans, and independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. We find no evidence that the allocation of federal spending to the states is distorted by strategic manipulation to win electoral support. States with many swing voters are not advantaged compared to states with more loyal voters, nor do "battleground states" attract more federal funds. Spending appears to have little or no effect on voters' choices, while partisanship and ideology have large effects.

In 2008, approximately 12 million immigrants lived illegally in the United States, and large numbers of undocumented foreigners resided also in other advanced destination countries. Hence, attempts at controlling immigration flows seem to often fail. If governments are not enforcing their "official" immigration policy, why do they set such a policy in the first place? The purpose of this paper is to address this apparent puzzle, using a political agency framework. We consider a setting in which there is uncertainty on the supply of migrants, and the policy maker -who faces elections -can be of one of two types. Either he has preferences congruent with the median voter, or he desires a larger number of migrants, because he is interested in the maximization of social welfare or has fallen prey to a pro-immigration lobby. We show that, if the incumbent wants to admit more migrants than the median voter, he might find it optimal to announce a binding quota to be re-elected, and strategically relax its enforcement. The control of migration flows can take place at the border or domestically, and we argue that even if the former is less effective as a policy tool, it might be chosen in equilibrium. Thus, our model illustrates how strategic considerations by elected officials play an important role in explaining both the observed large number of illegal immigrants and lax enforcement.JEL classification: F22, J61.