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 explores the role of political stability on fiscal policy choices in a time-series ana-lysis over 158 years on the Swiss federal level. We argue that the fiscal-commons problem of public finances is affected by the time-horizon of a finance minister. Arguably, the incentives for an...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...