This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and,...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...