National or political cake?

Jean-François Maystadt and Muhammad Kabir Salihu

No 100756558, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: Analysing the effect of opportunistic fiscal transfers on the electoral fortune of incumbent politicians can be very difficult due to problems of endogeneity. In this paper, we use oil windfalls as an exogenous variation in the political discretion an incumbent government can exert in rule-based transfers. Exploiting within-state variation between 2007 and 2015 in Nigeria, an increase in VAT transfers induced by higher oil windfalls is found to improve the electoral fortune of an incumbent government. Our results question the role of rule-based transfers as an efficient institutional arrangement in resource-abundant countries.

Keywords: Intergovernmental transfers; ruled-based transfers; political manipulation; fiscal federalism; Nigeria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H70 H77 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... casterWP2015_030.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lan:wpaper:100756558

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().