We examine how Green governments influence macroeconomic, education, and environmental outcomes. Our empirical strategy exploits that the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan gave rise to an unanticipated change in government in the German state Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2011. The incumbent rightwing...

We investigate how protectionist policies influence economic growth. Our empirical strategy exploits an extraordinary tax scandal that gave rise to an unexpected change of government in Sweden. A free-trade majority in parliament was overturned by a protectionist majority in 1887. We employ the...

We use the US presidential election on 3 November 2020 to examine how the US president influences economic expectations of international experts. We design a large-scale RCT among 843 experts working in 107 countries, asking about their expectations regarding GDP growth, unemployment, inflation,...

We examine how populist governments influence political culture and economic outcomes. Some Austrian communities are governed by far-right populist mayors, directly elected by a majority of voters. We exploit close elections and find that the electorate becomes more polarized under populist...

We introduce a new dataset that includes quantitative harmonized indices of tax reforms based on qualitative information of about 900 Economic Surveys from the OECD and 37,000 tax-related news from the IBFD archives. The data set provides indicators on tax reforms for tax rates and tax bases,...

Does social media or offline social cohesion overcome collective action problems more effectively when both types of networks are prevalent? We investigate non-violent protests against a place-based economic reform in Austria—a country where one in two citizens uses Facebook but also one in...

Can one single political leader influence macroeconomic expectations on a global scale? We design a large-scale survey experiment among influential economic experts working in more than 100 countries and use the 2020 US presidential election as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the effect...

This contribution examines the role of capitalism in anti-American terrorism. Using data for 149 countries between 1970 and 2007, this contribution, contrary to expectations from capitalist peace theory, does not find that Anti-American terrorism increases with external economic liberalization...

We investigate a case of political favoritism. Some members of the Bavarian parliament hired relatives as office employees who were paid using taxpayers' money. We examine whether being involved in the scandal influenced re-election prospects and voter turnout. The results do not show that being...

We examine partisan bias in inflation expectations. Our dataset includes inflation expectations of the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations over the period June 2013 to June 2018. The results show that inflation expectations were 0.46 percentage points higher in Republican-dominated...