Working papers

This IREF working paper, by Sergio Beraldo, Massimiliano Piacenza, and Gilberto Turati explores the notion of personal responsibility by considering people’s attitude towards redistribution. In particular, the authors run a controlled experiment by offering a representative group of people the possibility of choosing a proportional tax rate on their income. The tax revenues are then redistributed in equal amounts to each member of the population. The results of this experiment gives interesting insights on the way a redistribution system could be thought out.
 

By Stefan Voigt and Nora el Bialy

There has been a sizeable number of studies trying to identify the determinants of judicial performance on the country level. Such a design is appropriate to identify underperforming single judges or underperforming courts or court districts. But it is not appropriate to identify institutions conducive to judicial performance. A dataset produced by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) contains very detailed information on the judicial systems of the 47 member countries of the Council of Europe. Relying on this dataset we find that (i) judicial efficiency is not a function of per capita income. In other words: poor countries can also afford it. (ii) judicial efficiency is not a function of the court budget. As such, a higher budget will not “buy” a more efficient judiciary. (iii) judicial efficiency is negatively – and very robustly – correlated with judicial councils, in other words: countries that do not have them should not introduce them.

Executive Summary
The European crisis is not behind us and easy solutions do not readily present themselves. Some of the causes of the crisis may be regarded as temporary while others are of a more structural nature. The housing bubble belongs to the former category; the failure of governments to implement common sense, growth-enhancing policies belongs to the latter.
 

Executive Summary
The main purpose of this paper is to investigate whether, and to which extent, the rules introduced by central governments effectively restrain the spending behaviour of the decentralized authorities. In this paper, the authors provide an innovative comparative analysis by considering two countries that share the same degree of economic development and many cultural traits – France and Italy. Yet, these two countries differ in one crucial respect. France has a tradition of strong centralization, bureaucratic discipline and detailed technocratic control on the periphery (the regions). By contrast, Italy is known to follow a more flexible approach, which allows for some negotiation between the central and the peripheral authorities and feeds expectations for assistance and bail-outs, should the regions engage in excessive spending and violate the budgetary rules set by the centre.