Budgetary Policy with Unified and Decentralized Appropriations Authority

Posted: 15 Aug 2002

See all articles by Dhammika Dharmapala

Dhammika Dharmapala

UC Berkeley School of Law; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute); European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Abstract

The divestiture of the House Appropriations Committee in the 1880's has received considerable attention of an empirical nature. This paper presents a formal model of legislative decisionmaking, using a common agency formulation to represent interest group lobbying of legislators. This framework is used to analyze the effects of decentralizing appropriations authority. The conditions under which decentralization leads to higher spending are characterized. It is argued that the conventional view that divestiture caused higher levels of spending only holds if decentralization created barriers to lobbying and political bargaining across different committees. In addition, the role of specialized committee knowledge is examined.

Keywords: Budgeting, Congressional committees, Common agency, Lobbying, Appropriations

JEL Classification: D72, H61

Suggested Citation

Dharmapala, Dhammika, Budgetary Policy with Unified and Decentralized Appropriations Authority. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=317420

Dhammika Dharmapala (Contact Author)

UC Berkeley School of Law ( email )

302 JSP
2240 Piedmont Ave
Berkeley, CA 94720
United States

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute) ( email )

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium

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