Is the Tax Collection Effort an Indicator of the Financial Condition of Spanish Municipalities?

ABSTRACT

The financial crisis beginning in 2007 drastically affected the financial resources of different governmental organizations, causing critical imbalances between resources and expenditure needs. This study aims to analyze whether the municipal tax collection effort in Spain could be an indicator of the financial condition of these institutions. As a preliminary step, a new methodology is used to assess their financial condition. We test tax collection effort as an indicator on a sample of more than 5,000 Spanish municipalities with fewer than 75,000 inhabitants. Results confirm that the budgetary solvency dimension is associated with the tax collection effort for all municipalities studied. Furthermore, in municipalities with populations of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, the level of the tax collection effort is indicative of most of the financial condition dimensions.     

When public-sector salaries become public knowledge: Academic salaries and Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act

Abstract: The effects of salary disclosure on public-sector compensation have long been a source of controversy in political and academic circles. Some commentators suggest that because of political pressure and closer public scrutiny, salary disclosure is a good thing because it results in pay that is both lower than it would otherwise be and more sensitive to performance. On the other hand, disclosure raises serious privacy considerations and could also have an inflationary effect on salaries unless all elements in a causal chain linking public knowledge and lower pay are firmly in place. In this study, the authors examine the implications of Ontario's Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act with respect to university-sector salaries. The main conclusions are that salary disclosure, in general, and in the academic sector in particular, has never fully accounted for proper comparability issues and has not been updated to reflect adjustments for inflation. The act also raises important questions of privacy that have not been fully addressed. Perhaps most notably, there is no evidence suggesting that salary disclosure has much of an influence in off-setting other factors affecting salary growth.     

Campaign spending and office-seeking motivations: an empirical analysis

This paper presents econometric evidence on the relationship between campaign spending and office seeking motivations. Our results, using Spanish data, show that campaign spending per capita increases with the stakes for the winner, measured by the appointment power of the office. Moreover we find that campaign spending per capita increases with the level of self-government of the region. Our results concord with those reported for other countries with very different systems of campaign funding.     

Spanish court rules in 'Accessorize' trade marks case

The Barcelona Court of First Instance No. 1 found in favourof the claimants, owners of the famous registered trade mark‘Accessorize’ in their action for trade mark infringement,trade mark cancellation, unfair competition, and damages inrespect of the use by the defendants of the Accessori, Mr Accessoriand Accessori trade marks.     

The Joint Democracy–Dyadic Conflict Nexus: A Simultaneous Equations Model

Many statistical studies in international relations investigate the claim that democracies do not fight one another. Virtually all of these studies employ a single-equation design, where the dependent variable measures the presence or absence of a dyadic militarized interstate dispute (MID). A separate group of studies argues that conflict affects democracy and that its effect could be positive or negative. By and large, these two bodies of literature have not incorporated one another's insights. We argue that democracy and dyadic conflict affect each other significantly and that statistical models that ignore the reciprocal nature of these effects may make incorrect inferences. To test this argument, we develop a simultaneous equations model of democracy and dyadic conflict. Our sample includes all the politically relevant dyads from 1950 to 1992. We find that dyadic military disputes reduce joint democracy and joint democracy reduces the probability of MIDs. Compared with the single-equation estimates in the literature, the absolute effect of joint democracy in our paper is smaller while in relative terms, the effect is similar in size. The effect of joint democracy on MID involvement is considerably smaller for noncontiguous countries than for contiguous ones. The effects of a number of control variables in the MID equation are also found to differ from those reported previously in single- equation–based studies.     

Too Fine to be Good? Issues of Granularity,Uniformity and Error in Spatial Crime Analysis

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Crime counts are sensitive to granularity choice. There is an increasing interest in analyzing crime at very fine granularities, such as street segments, with...     

Bilateral Import, Export, and Conflict/Cooperation Simultaneity

A mathematical model of dyadic trade and the level of political conflict/cooperation is developed and empirically tested. The model extends the literature in three ways. First, the bilateral trade quantities and the level of conflict/cooperation are simultaneously determined. Second, the commonly used unitary state actor is replaced by a government, an exporter, and an importer in each country in a dyad. Third, action-reaction conflict/cooperation dynamics are incorporated into the model. The model predicts that the effect of bilateral trade quantity on conflict/cooperation and the effect of conflict/cooperation on the monetary value of trade may be positive or negative, whereas the effect of conflict on trade quantity will be negative. These predictions depend on certain conditions, heretofore unrecognized in the literature. The empirical test employs statistical methods, and the results generally support the model's predictions. Overall, this paper suggests that contemporary trade and conflict theories may miss important elements, pointing out the need for richer, more microfounded models.