Recent years have witnessed a rise in right-wing extremism among German youth and young adults. This paper investigates the extent to which the experience of parental unemployment during childhood affects young people's far right-wing attitudes and xenophobia. Estimates from three German data...

Can a growing welfare state induce a regime switch in the growth rate of an econ-omy? This paper constructs a dynamic political economy model of economic growth and the welfare state in which both variables are non-linearly related and jointly en-dogenous. Using a Markov switching framework over...

We present a model of optimal government policy when policy choices may exacerbate socio-political instability (SPI). We show that optimal policy that takes into account SPI transforms a standard concave growth model into a model with both a poverty trap and endogenous growth. The resulting...

Is it politically feasible for governments to engineer endogenous growth? This paper illustrates two reasonable political decision mechanisms by which fiscal policy generates endogenous growth with a single accumulable factor, under a constant returns to scale production technology, and without...

This paper analyses the consequences of the planned enlargement on the EU budget for the years 2007 and 2013. It concentrates on the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and Structural Policy and calculates the possible fiscal consequences of enlarging the EU for various policy scenarios. Enlarging...

This paper constructs a heterogenous agent model of endogenous distribution and growth. When the labor leisure choice of agents is exogenous, the factor holding ratios of households converges to a mass point that is independent of the initial distribution of capital in the steady state. There is...

This paper generalizes the analysis of distributive conflict, politics, and growth developed by by Alesina-Rodrik (1994). We construct a heterogenous-agent framework in which both growth and the distribution of wealth are endogenous. Due to adjustments in the distribution of wealth, the...

As a prerequisite of an appropriate anti-terror strategy, it is indispensable to assess the underlying causes of terror. We examine social and economic conditions in the country of origin of terrorist attacks, claiming that low opportunity costs of terror, e.g., approximated by slow growth and...

In this paper we study the response of vote shares to economic fluctuations and conflict. Spain seems to be the ideal niche for a case study like this since it has experienced both phenomena during the last decades. Recent Spanish democratic history has witnessed four complete economic cycles,...

In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using...