Abstract
Pork-barrel spending is a form of public spending controlled by individual legislators and primarily serving a local interest. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a type of pork, council member capital discretionary education spending voted upon in a participatory budgeting (PB) process, on school budgets and performance in New York City. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in discretionary spending induced by the PB elections, we find winning a PB election increases school pork appropriations. However, we find no evidence these transfers from council members improve fiscal and performance outcomes. Further, pork may interfere with school budgeting.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 148-170 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Public Budgeting and Finance |
Volume | 42 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 1 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 Public Financial Publications, Inc.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Finance
- Economics and Econometrics
- Public Administration