Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWhen investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor affecting local governments;federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of local governments. In this paper we make use of a discontinuity in the Swedish grant system in order to estimate the causal effects of general intergovernmental grants on local spending and local tax rates. The formula for the distribution of funds is used as an exclusion restriction in an IV-estimation. We find evidence of crowding-in, where federal grants are shifted to more local spending, but not to reduced local tax rates. Our results thus confirm a flypaper effect for Sweden.

Excessive administrative spending in local governments has been a concern in the public debate in Norway. Administration takes resources away from welfare services such as primary education and care for the elderly. Since administrative spending varies considerably between local governments, a study of the political and economic factors involved is warranted. The central hypothesis is that the administrators will have more power relative to the politicians when political control is divided between parties. Estimation of a demand model of administration added political structure shows strong empirical correlations between types of coalition governments and socialist controlled governments and the level of administrative spending. Divided political control strengthens the hands of the agenda setting bureaucrats.

Recent studies investigate the urban wage premium associated with education and work experience. We study the effect of work experience and firm tenure across education groups. All education groups benefit more from working in cities, and the extra city wage premium highly educated enjoy over less educated workers is increasing with city work experience. Interestingly, the city wage premium of less educated workers is increasing in firm tenure, while the highly educated gain more by shifting jobs between firms. The analysis is based on administrative registers covering all full time private sector workers in Norway, about 4.7 million worker-year observations.

Property taxation, Yardstick competition, Bayesian spatial probit, C11, C25, D78, H71,

No abstract

Journal article"Thailand has experienced economic growth well above world averages from 1960 to the recent crisis. While the controversy over Thailand and East Asian growth has discussed the role of capital accumulation versus productivity, we analyze the general equilibrium interaction between productivity and investment in an intertemporal growth model. The high growth is understood as a prolonged transition path with gradual tariff reduction and endogenous productivity driven by foreign spillover feeding capital investment. Counterfactual analyses show how protection would have reduced growth with productivity and investment slowdown, while shock liberalization would have raised immediate growth with faster convergence to steady state." -- Authors' AbstractISI; IFPRI3; Theme 5; GRP32; Theme 9DSGDP

No abstract

Fiscal discipline is a concern because of possible spending and deficit bias in fiscal and political institutions. This study investigates adjustments under fiscal federalism, concentrating on decentralized government in Denmark and allowing for a comparison with neighbors Norway and Sweden and with similar analyses of U.S. states. Fiscal adjustments are investigated as responses to shocks measured as deviations from budgeted current surplus. The econometric results show that local governments respond by compensating adjustment of tax rates and expenditures. The shock responses tend to be asymmetric. Positive shocks hardly affect the income tax rate, whereas negative shocks induce higher tax rates. The authors interpret the asymmetry as the result of spending pressure due to redistributive politics and show that political characteristics are important for tax determination. They conclude that the Danish design of controlling the local public sector avoids fiscal imbalances but allows a bias toward expansion.