More than one third of the European Union's total budget is spent on socalled Cohesion Policy via the structural funds. Its main purpose is to promote the development of the EU and to support convergence between the levels of development of the various European regions. Investigating the impact...

This paper is concerned with fiscal externalities arising from local taxation of a mobile factor. Using a panel of more 1100 local jurisdictions it provides empirical evidence on how the local tax rate as well as the tax rate in the neighborhood affect the local tax base. The results support the...

This paper models voters' preferences over central versus local education policies when there are private alternatives. Education is financed by income taxes and individuals are mobile between communities. Public education levels are chosen by majority vote. Contrary to conventional wisdom,...

I test if parties matter with respect to the allocation of public expenditures in Germany. Considering the allocation of rights and duties due to the federal structure, two econometric models are estimated. First, a SURE model analyses spending at the federal level for the period from 1950 to...

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...

The surge in the German house prices starting in 2010 raised fears about the emergence of a speculative bubble. Given a local nature of housing markets, it is not clear to what extent the bubble, if any, is spread across different cities. In this paper, we test for speculative house price...

We examine the scope and value of targeted advertising in the magazine industry. We use data on reader characteristics at individual media, in contrast to previous work that has needed to infer this information from aggregate data. Our results show a strong relationship between subscriber...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the monthly growth rates of the prices and rents for flats in 26 largest German cities. Given the small time dimension, the forecasts are done in a panel-data format. In addition, we use panel models that account for spatial dependence between the...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (states) simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, such as pooled and fixed-effects models, we apply panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence...

The determinants of the cross-market transmission mechanism for terrorist shocks are explored, focusing on two major terrorist events and 68 national stock markets. We generate daily abnormal returns from a three-factor world asset pricing model. Abnormal returns are then regressed on proxies of...