In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

German policy during the Eurozone crisis supposedly follows an ordoliberal tradition. In this paper, we discuss to what extent this contention holds and to what extent Germany pragmatically responded to different crisis phenomena. A proper analysis of ordoliberal thinking reveals that the...

We analyze how the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and discretionary changes in taxbenefit systems have affected the cushioning of income shocks in the Euro zone and the EU-27 in the period 2007-2014. We propose a new summary measure of the combined effect of automatic stabilizers and...

The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

We test whether the proactive use of instruments of direct democracy by voters can help to explain fiscal sustainability of 25 Swiss cantons. Using data of all cantonal popular votes since 1977, our results show that the fiscal reaction of cantonal governments to an increase in the debt to GDP...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

We analyze different options for the design of a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA). We assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the period...