We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic...

Do incumbents in an election have an advantage, and if so, are these advantages heterogeneous across parties or government and opposition? We first present a theoretical discussion on the possible heterogeneity of incumbency effects in a pure two-party system. Then, we estimate the incumbency...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the party incumbency advantage in mayoral elections in Germany. Using a regression discontinuity design on a data set of about 25,000 elections, I estimate a causal incumbency effect of 38-40 percentage points in the probability of winning the next mayor...

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 models conflictual interaction between a European state and a domestic dissident immigrant minority group, Muslims say, some of whom may resort to acts of terrorism. Here, identity is crucial and provides the micro-foundations of dissident behaviour by solving the collective action...

This paper focuses on two areas of security concern for the European Union: terrorism and international crime. I present a model of game-theoretic interaction between a European state and a domestic dissident group, who, on occasion, may resort to acts of terrorism. Here, identity is crucial to...

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific...

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...

This paper explores the interdependency of political institutions from the voter's perspective. Specifically, we are interested in three questions: (1) Does the partisan identity of the local mayor influence the voter's decision in the subsequent town council election?; (2) Does this partisan...

Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements...