Larcinese, Valentino and Rizzo, Leonzio and Testa, Cecilia (2007): Do Small States Get More Federal Monies? Myth and Reality about the US Senate Malapportionment.
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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.
|Item Type:||MPRA Paper|
|Institution:||University of Ferrara|
|Original Title:||Do Small States Get More Federal Monies? Myth and Reality about the US Senate Malapportionment|
|Keywords:||federal budget; malapportionment; small state advantage; overrepresentation|
|Subjects:||H - Public Economics > H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies > H50 - General
H - Public Economics > H6 - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt > H61 - Budget; Budget Systems
H - Public Economics > H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
H - Public Economics > H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies > H59 - Other
H - Public Economics > H7 - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations > H76 - State and Local Government: Other Expenditure Categories
H - Public Economics > H5 - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies > H53 - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
|Depositing User:||Leonzio Rizzo|
|Date Deposited:||17. Oct 2007|
|Last Modified:||18. Feb 2013 18:05|
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