This paper applies the concept of damage coefficients introduced in Houba and Kremers (2008) to provide an estimate of the cost of climate change - in particular the cost of changes in mean regional temperature and precipitation - to the fruit vegetation sector. We concentrate on the production...

Habit formation theory and the transformative voting hypothesis both imply that voting has downstream consequences for turnout and political involvement. Although several studies have applied causal research designs to study this question, the long-run evidence is extremely limited, especially...

This paper presents a novel theory of corruption in public procurement. It considers an agency setting of contract execution where the principal is a politician who can commit to a contract auditing policy. It is found that a benevolent politician, by choosing a sufficiently strict auditing,...

The estimation of the costs of conflict is currently receiving a lot of attention in the literature. This paper aims to give a thorough overview of the existing literature, first by addressing the history of case studies that address conflict costs and second by looking at the existing body of...

This article analyses how the presence of a dominant group of voters within the electorate affects voter turnout. Theoretically, we argue that both the absolute size and the relative power of a dominant group influence voters' decision-making process. The former effect derives from increased...

We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption...

To internalize pollution externalities into household waste generation, Unit Pricing Systems (UPS) have been adopted worldwide. This paper evaluates the causal effects of a UPS on the disposal of municipal solid waste in Trento, Italy. To account for policy endogeneity due to unobservables, we...

This paper studies the importance of politician's qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2,031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and...

One prediction of the calculus of voting is that electoral closeness positively affects turnout via a higher probability of one vote being decisive. I test this theory with data on all mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria between 1946 and 2009. Importantly, I use constitutionally...

It is a longstanding debate whether members of parliament (MPs) should be allowed to follow sideline jobs in addition to their mandate. Critics claim that politicians already face binding time constraints and that moonlighting might lead to a neglect of inner-parliamentary duties. The purpose of...