Stijn Goeminne

Politics and public infrastructure investments in local governments: empirical evidence from Flemish municipalities (1996-2009)

This article offers new evidence on the political determinants of local governments public investment policy. A public infrastructure investment function was estimated using data for 307 out of 308 Flemish municipalities covering the period 1996–2009. The results reveal that government composition and the timing of the elections matter. The presence of the Liberal Party decreases investments, whereas fragmentation of the government has the opposite effect. Significantly higher investment levels were recorded in years preceding elections contrary to post-election years, which show important slowdown in investment policies. Finally, the analysis shows that local governments are sensitive to the investment policy of neighbouring municipalities. The positive spatial interaction effect implies that a municipalitys investments increase on average with 26.2% of changes in investment levels by neighbouring municipalities.

The real impact of a one-off fiscal restriction: empirical evidence of a flypaper effect in Flemish municipalities

This paper analyses the effects of a one-off fiscal restriction on Flemish local government spending. The authors provide evidence of a ‘flypaper effect’: fiscal restriction stimulated the sensitivity of local spending to grants. This means that higher-level governments (regional/national/supranational) need to take a flypaper effect into account when considering one-off fiscal restrictions on lower-level governments.

Determinants of financial performance in public organisations

ABSTRACT In the slipstream of NPM, public organizations worldwide have had to increase their financial performance by adopting management practices. Nonetheless, financial performance (FP) might be mostly predicted by contingencies that are not within direct managerial control. Drawing on evidence from 308 Flemish municipalities, this article shows that organizational and environmental contingencies affect FP, but a significant amount of variation in FP is unexplained—indicating that management could well matter.

The impact of internationalization on volume and quality of scholarly publication performance

This article discusses the effect of academic teaching staff mobility and publication performance. It investigates how international teaching assignments affect research output (measured in terms of publication). The research described covered a large range of publication types (for example in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, book chapters), disciplines and positions, as well as the duration and number of international visits. Generally, short, frequent teaching assignments increased productivity.

Strategic Use of Debt in Flemish Municipalities

Abstract This paper discusses the literature on strategic use of debt models and tests the seminal models of Persson & Svensson (1989) and Alesina & Tabellini (1990) on a dataset of Flemish municipalities. The literature on strategic deficit and debt behaviour originates from the question whether or not incumbent policymakers run higher budget deficits than they would if they were confident of re-election. In this paper, we introduce a vote function to estimate the probability of electoral defeat and present evidence of strategic debt in line with Persson & Svensson (1989), but only for leftist governments with expected vote percentages below 49%. There is no indication that rightist governments without re-election prospects are sensitive to strategic debt behaviour.