This paper investigates whether the socioeconomic status of the head of government helps explain fiscal performance. Applying sociological research that attributes differences in people's ways of thinking and acting to their relative standing within society, we test whether the social status of...

Sustainablity of Austrian public debt is investigated in the context of political objectives such as stabilizing the business cycle, increasing chances for being re-elected and implementing the ideologies of political parties. Several tests indicate that Austrian fiscal policies were sustainable...

Der Tagungsband zur Arbeitstagung 2004 des Finanzwissenschaftlichen Ausschusses zum Thema 'Haushaltsdisziplin und öffentliche Verschuldung' bietet in vier Beiträgen einen kompetenten Überblick über Erklärungsansätze für die angespannte Lage der öffentlichen Haushalte und über...

This paper studies regional output asymmetries following U.S. federal tax shocks. We estimate a vector autoregressive model for each U.S. state, utilizing the exogenous tax shock series recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010) and find considerable variations: estimated output multipliers lie...

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the German population conducted on our behalf by GfK in the first quarter of 2013. The survey addresses important topics in fiscal policy, including: 1) public preferences on the...

A widespread view in the 'political budget cycles' literature is that incumbent politicians seek to influence voters' perceptions of their competence and/or preferences by using the composition of the fiscal budget as a signalling tool. However, little is known about whether voters actually...

Employing a sample of Spanish municipalities from the Madrid region for the period 2010-2019, we study the influence of a politician's sex on political budget cycles (PBCs). The Madrid region is subject to a homogenous set of budget rules, which allows consistently categorising budget...

In response to the economic crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments provided financial assistance to households. Using representative consumer surveys conducted during the pandemic in 2020, we examine the effects of this fiscal policy instrument on households in two emerging...

In response to the spillovers of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy, many governments paid cash transfers to households. We examine the effect of this fiscal policy instrument on households in two emerging economies, Vietnam and Thailand. Our analysis is based representative population surveys...

We study state-dependent effects of narratively identified tax shocks in Germany and the UK over the period 1974Q1-2018Q4 using local projections. In addition, we distinguish between aggregated and disaggregated tax types (direct and indirect taxes) as well as look for possible asymmetries...