Performance rating and yardstick competition in social service provision

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends, by lessening local information spill-overs, to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto-correlation among local government expenditures. It analyses UK local government expenditures on personal social services before and after the introduction of a national performance assessment system (SSPR, Social Services Performance Rating) that would attribute a rating to each local authority. The empirical evidence suggests that the introduction of the SSPR has substantially reduced policy mimicking among neighboring jurisdictions. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL classification: C21, H72, H77.

Interactions in Local Governments' Spending Decisions: Evidence from Portugal

“…For European countries refer to BORDIGNON et al, 2003;SOLLÉ-OLLÉ, 2003;ALLERS and ELHORST, 2005;REVELLI, 2006b, and REDOANO, 2007. CALDEIRA, 2012, analyses the Chinese case.…”

Health care expenditure and income in the OECD reconsidered: Evidence from panel data

“…In our empirical work we will adopt weights based on the inverse of the distance expressed in kilometers across countries. A recent strand of literature in health economics has suggested a number of reasons why one should expect geographical concentration of unobservable risk factors of health care spending (Revelli, 2006 (Alexander, 1993), childhood cancer (Gatrell and Whitelegg, 1993), and asthma (Hsiao, 2000). We remark that most of these works detect very localised forms of concentration of diseases.…”

Party cues and yardstick voting

“…This use of neighbouring jurisdictions as a yardstick enables them, under certain conditions, to learn more about their own incumbent's quality (e.g., Salmon, 1987Salmon, , 2005Besley and Case, 1995). However, despite the clear structuring importance of political parties in real life, partisanship is completely ignored in previous models of this kind (Revelli, 2006, conjectures about the potential importance of politics in models of yardstick voting but does not rigorously follow up on this idea). The present paper takes a first step to address this issue and shows that allowing for partisan effects entails that the use of neighbouring jurisdictions as a yardstick is no longer straightforward.…”