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This paper analyses the effect of a particular Active Labour Market Policy, the hiring incentives, on firms hiring policies. The effects of a programme on firms' behaviour have in fact rarely been evaluated.

The analysis is based on micro-data drawn from Rilevazione su Imprese Lavoro (RIL), conducted by Inapp in 2010, 2015 and 2018 on a representative sample of limited liability and partnership firms. The authors apply a policy evaluation framework to investigate the impact of the use of incentives in the short run. The authors infer the counterfactual policy scenario thanks to a survey question that asks about firms' behaviour in the absence of the incentives. The authors also control for firms' unobserved heterogeneity, including firm's fixed effects, and endogeneity issues, estimating a differences-in-differences model that exploit the longitudinal component of the RIL survey.

The authors find that the use of at least one incentive scheme in 2017 is associated with an increase in the share of newly hired of about 0.07 percentage point in the short run. Moreover, hiring incentives have a small positive relationship with the share of both young workers and temporary contracts. Finally, these results are robust to endogeneity issues.

The analysis provides an updated evaluation of the effectiveness of hiring incentives in Italy by focusing on firms' behaviour rather than on the evolution of individual employment. It identifies the impact by using a rich set of econometric methods as well as counterfactual analysis.

The evaluation of the after tax cost of leasing is rather complex and financial operators often fail to emphasise the cost/benefit balance. We propose an analytical formula for the direct calculation of the true cost of leasing which does not involve the study of cash flows. Our discussion concerns the situation that we know best, the Italian case, which can easily be used more generally.

Kosovo has experienced a radical shift from a centrally planned economy to a market economy and built institutions from scratch. During the institutional building process, due to inconsistencies in institutional reforms, firms faced several challenges in competing in the domestic market and engaging in exporting activities. The purpose of the study is threefold. First, to examine how institutional settings influence family firms’ success; second, how and which types of strategic behaviours family firms pursue in response to institutional deficiencies and third, whether and how internationalisation helps the firms overcome the difficulties resulting from deficiencies of the institutions.

This study employs a qualitative document analysis technique using secondary and primary data to examine the impact of institutional settings on firm internationalisation and related firm reactions.

Findings suggest that fiscal policy, weak protection of property rights and contractual enforcement negatively influenced family firms because of unfair competition, unpredictable business environment and additional costs due to deficient institutions. The authors found that internationalisation provided benefits for the firms in handling the problems posed by the institutions. The firms focused on three main strategies to respond to weak institutions: improving product quality, diversifying and differentiating products and setting competitive prices.

This study contributes to the literature and explains how and which economic institutions influence firm internationalisation and how engagement in international business activities provides an advantage in responding to deficient institutions in the home country.

The impact of fiscal decentralization on equalization between regions has received significant attention but there has been much less research of the impact of decentralization on equalization within regions. Theory suggests that the tradeoff between local fiscal autonomy and equalization ought to be most pronounced at the sub-region level where rural-urban disparities in the level of development are substantial. This paper is an empirical analysis of the impact of fiscal decentralization on equalization within one Russian region, Leningrad (State). We show that the regional government uses a mixture of fiscal instruments to strike a balance between giving more budgetary autonomy to local governments and eliminating the disparities among them. We also develop a method for studying this tradeoff between decentralization and equalization when only limited data are available. Finally, we argue and demonstrate that without a detailed understanding of the institutional arrangement for intergovernmental fiscal relations, one cannot evaluate the equalization or decentralization implications.

The purpose of this article is to determine the influence of the tax system on the location of holding companies in Spain.

To achieve this purpose, we have used an analysis of cointegration in time series. The independent variable used was the number of holding companies under Régimen de Entidades de Tenencia de Valores Extranjeros Spanish regime. The dependent variables were divided into two groups: fiscal and non-fiscal variables. The dependent fiscal variables are effective tax rate and double taxation convention, whereas the non-fiscal dependent variables are government effectiveness and business freedom.

The study concludes that the fiscal variables are relevant to establish a holding company in Spain, but there are other variables such as government effectiveness and business freedom that show as well as influence on the location of holding companies.

In the year 2015, the article The influence of the tax system on the location of holding companies in Switzerland was published in the Competitiveness Review. In this article, the influence of taxation on the decision to locate a holding company in Switzerland was analyzed. Now that the Spanish holding regime is consolidated, thanks to more than twenty years of application in our tax legislation, we consider it important to carry out an analysis of the influence of taxation in the decision to locate a holding company in our country. As already mentioned in the article published in 2015, the study of the taxation of holding companies is a topic related more to law firms and/or tax advisors than to academic research, and it is for this reason that there are few empirical studies on this topic. Hence, the research developed in this paper is important.

Municipal financial decisions involve the interaction of political actors (including voters, elected officials, and bureaucrats) pursuing their own interests. Although voters should determine public choices through elected officials, bureaucrats have the incentives and may have the monopoly power to dominate the process. This study investigates the relationships among municipal spending, fiscal manipulation, and financial monitoring. Fiscal illusion (as measured by revenue complexity) is employed as an empirical surrogate for bureaucratic manipulation and it is hypothesized that financial audits are an effective monitoring technique for moderating possible bureaucratic manipulation. The results of the study suggest that expenditure levels are related to political power and that fiscal illusion is significant for explaining expenditure levels, especially for cities having qualified opinions. Weak support is provided for the hypothesis that the financial audit is a monitoring technique that may constrain bureaucratic overspending. These findings have important implications for both public administration and governmental accounting and suggest the need for further research on monitorig effectiveness.

This study aims to explore the underlying patterns in tax innovation. Prior studies of local sales taxes still leave a gap in the literature and render the results inconclusive because the studies cover either state level or localities within a single state for a short period. To cover the gap, we assemble a dataset of counties in all states for FY1970-2006 but focus on 12 states not threatened by intra-jurisdictional competition. Our empirical analyses yield evidence that a county adopts local sales tax for political and economic rationale rather than fiscal condition. Accordingly, regional diffusion has positive effects on local sales tax adoption in a county. These findings contribute substantively to sales tax literature while confirming policy diffusion.

The purpose of this paper is to examine resource allocation under the centrally sponsored scheme Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and its impact on development of elementary education in India. First, the author describes the current educational disparity across states in terms of state funding. Second, the author shows that interstate disparities in education resources have more to do with capacity of states to finance elementary education. For this, the author examines funding mechanism under SSA, focusing on principles of adequacy and absorptive rates. Third, the author analyzes the impact of additional funding on the progress of elementary education across states. Fourth, the author demonstrates how funding under SSA reinforces rather than reduces interstate disparity in school funding. Finally, the author concludes with certain policy implications for reforming federal transfers in Right to Education (RTE)-SSA, which can easily be extended to Rashtria Madhya Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) to be more responsive to educational inadequacy, effort and capacity across states.

The author uses box plots for illustrating interstate disparity across various indicators on financing and growth of elementary education. Box plots are good at portraying extreme values and illustrate differences between distributions. Because the thrust of the paper is examining difference in distribution across and within states, box plots appropriately portray the distribution of both. Further, coefficient of variation is estimated in education funding and its impact variables.

Interstate disparity in additional to the funding of SSA through discretionary transfers is examined by looking at two principles of inter-governmental transfers, viz., adequacy and absorptive rates. In a way, it appears that the educationally backward states getting the highest shares and also as per the requirement of the child population, but not necessarily so in terms of their relative proportions of enrolment, schools and teachers. Yet another revelation is that actual absorptive rates are much less than apparent absorptive rates. Unambiguously, additional resources coming from the Center for Development of Education can have a positive influence only after states have achieved a certain threshold level of absorptive capacities. As evidenced, fiscal disability is not compensated by transfers via SSA, as matching shares are uniform across states.

One significant limitations of the study is its use of administrative data. Often, administrative data from developing countries especially on social sector like education report inflated figures. The study uses primarily such but published secondary data sources.

Finally, the author suggests certain policy implications for reforming federal role in the current RTE-SSA, which can easily be extended to RMSA, a CSS in secondary education, to be more responsive to state effort and capacity.

Though SSA attempts to address regional imbalance, the accumulated initial advantage of better-off states with uniform norms under SSA funding widens the interstate disparity rather than reduce it. It is, hence, mandated to look at building capacities and enable states for a level-playing field.

It adds value to existing studies in two ways: rarely studies examine SSA expenditures and its impact on development and financing of elementary education, and examine a question on horizontal equalization mechanism whether additional allocation under SSA induce or reduce interstate disparity.

Ten years after the first comprehensive review of fiscal noting in the states, revisiting the impact of cost analysis on unfunded state mandates yields pessimistic conclusions. More states have adopted fiscal noting over the period, yet few report that the process is successful. The majority of fiscal notes contain no cost estimates at all for a variety of reasons, including lack of time, lack of resources, lack of legislative attention, and perhaps lack of institutional capacity.

Since 2005, Belgian housing prices have strongly increased. As the timing coincides with the implementation of a new fiscal package in order to stimulate homeownership, our study attempts to provide an understanding whether the mortgage interest and capital deduction (MICPD) policy has had the side-effect of increasing housing prices while, at the same time, controlling for key housing price determinants.

A fixed-effects regression model is used on a panel dataset of the three Belgian regions over the period 1995–2015.

Estimations are carried out separately for different house types, being useful as our empirical analysis ascertains a significant price-increasing effect for ordinary houses and apartments but a significant price-reducing effect for villas. In addition, we find, among other things, that interest rates' influence has been less substantial than commonly thought.

These results are relevant for all governments willing to stimulate homeownership through fiscal stimuli.