The paper analyzes the relation between institutional quality, such as corruption, in a country and its monetary regime. It is shown that a credibly fixed exchange rate to a low inflation country, like a currency board, can reduce corruption and improve the fiscal system. A monetary union,...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...

This paper studies the short-run macroeconomic effects of legislated tax changes in Germany using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Identification of the tax shock follows the narrative approach recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010). Results indicate a moderate, but statistically...