In this paper we use a simple bureaucracy model of fiscal illusion to analyze the impact of intergovernmental grants on the cost efficiency of local jurisdictions. We find that a higher degree of redistribution within a system of fiscal equalization or an increase in the amount of grants...

German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments' vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...

Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier gibt einen Überblick über den Stand der Diskussion um soziale oder ökologische Kriterien in der Vorstandsvergütung und untersucht, welche Erfahrungen und Einschätzungen Arbeitnehmervertreter/innen in den Aufsichtsräten mit der Einführung erweiterter Kriterien...

Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier gibt einen Überblick über den Stand der Diskussion um soziale oder ökologische Kriterien in der Vorstandsvergütung und untersucht, welche Erfahrungen und Einschätzungen Arbeitnehmervertreter/innen in den Aufsichtsräten mit der Einführung erweiterter Kriterien...

Voluntary environmental management programs for firms have become an increasingly popular instrument of environmental policy. However, the literature's conclusion on the effectiveness of suchprograms is ambiguous, and for the European region there is a lack of evidence based on a large control...

Recently a wide and empirically-backed consensus has emerged arguing that direct democratic control over government's spending decisions through initiatives and referenda constrains government size. But what happens if budgetary matters are excluded from the voters' right of the initiative? I...

While there are numerous studies on the measurement of the technical or cost efficiency of local governments, the analysis of the main drivers of this efficiency has attracted far less attention in this literature. However, information about the main sources of (in) efficiency are not...

This paper studies the role of direct democracy in ensuring efficient and cost effective provision of goods and services in the public sector. The sample consists of the population of municipalities in the German State of Bavaria, where in the mid-1990s considerable direct democratic reforms...

Empirical analyses of the determinants of environmental innovations were rarely able to distinguish between different areas of environmental impacts. The paper tries to close this gap by employing a new and unique dataset based on the German Community Innovation Survey conducted in 2009. The...

In this study, the real demand for global and local environmental protection in Beijing, China, is elicited and investigated. Participants from Beijing were offered the opportunity to contribute to voluntary climate change mitigation by purchasing permits from two Chinese CO2 emissions trading...