Do Small States Get More Federal Monies? Myth and Reality about the US Senate Malapportionment

Valentino Larcinese, Leonzio Rizzo and Cecilia Testa

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We analyze the relationship between senate malapportionment and the allocation of the US federal budget to the states during the period 1978-2002. A substantial literature originating from the in�uential paper by Atlas et al. (1995), using a within estimation methodology �nds that small and overrepresented states get signi�cantly larger shares of federal funds. Revisiting the econometric speci�cation used by the current empiri- cal research, we show that the number of senators percapita is inappropriate to capture malapportionement in regressions using broad federal programs, and that the results ob- tained with this indicator are extremely non-robust to reasonable speci�cation changes. In particular, senators percapita have a signi�cant impact on federal spending only in re- gressions containing state �xed e¤ects. Furthermore, the coefficients estimated using the within methodology are statistically di¤erent across states and, therefore, cannot be used to assess spending differentials between states. The magnitude and signi�cance of those coe¢ cients suggest a within state-speci�c inverse relationship between broad spending categories and population which is not systematically related to the size of the states and seems more compatible with incrementalist theories of budget allocation.

Keywords: federal budget; malapportionment; small state advantage; overrepresentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H5 H50 H53 H59 H61 H76 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Do Small States Get More Federal Monies?Myth and Reality About the US SenateMalapportionment (2009)
Working Paper: Do small states get more federal monies?: myth and reality about the US Senate malapportionment (2009)
Working Paper: Do Small States Get More Federal Monies? Myth and Reality About the US Senate Malapportionment (2009)
Working Paper: Do Small States Get More Federal Monies? Myth and Reality about the US Senate Malapportionment (2007)
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