We describe the evolution of the power struggle in Greece among key economic and political stakeholders, who have tried, via strategic positioning and rent-seeking activities, to influence economic policy outcomes during the postwar decades. We split the postwar decades in three periods: the...

During the last three decades there has been an almost continuous undermining of the public interest by private interests operating either outside or inside Greek public administration. The result of this infiltration has been a gradual loss of bureaucratic autonomy to pursue the public...

Does social capital always promote solidarity and democracy, or are social networks such as sports clubs also vulnerable to populism? We exploit quasi-experimental variation in sports club membership in German cities. Sports clubs are booming in cities with successful soccer teams which pass the...

Using information from all IMF conditionality programs from 1990 to 2018, we implement a dynamic Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting Regression Adjustment approach to examine the effects of programs, including public sector dismissals, on the size of the shadow economy. The estimated effect...

The paper examines the effects of the age-differentiated decreases in the minimum wage which Greece implemented in 2012, and which involved the introduction of a subminimum wage as a result of the reduction of the minimum wage by 22% for workers aged 25 and above, and by 32% for those aged less...

The paper examines the effects of the age-differentiated decreases in the minimum wage which Greece implemented in 2012, and which involved the introduction of a subminimum wage as a result of the reduction of the minimum wage by 22% for workers aged 25 and above, and by 32% for those aged less...

Party performance in state and federal elections is highly interdependent. Federal elections impact regional voting dynamics and vice versa (electoral externalities). We quantify the extent of simultaneous electoral externalities between two layers of government. We apply vector autoregressions...

In this paper we construct a political economy model in which minimum wages are determined according to the wishes of the median voter. Using the minimum wage scheme as the status quo, we show that the replacement of minimum wages by wage subsidies guaranteeing the same (pre-tax) level of income...

Spatial inequalities in publicly provided goods such as health care facilities have substantial socio-economic effects. Little is known, however, as to why publicly provided goods diverge among urban and rural regions. We exploit narrow parliamentary majorities in German states between 1950 and...

How do staying minorities that evade ethnic cleansing integrate into re-settled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning anti-fascists. We study quasi-experimental...