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,...

We assess to which degree an international transfer mechanism can enhance consumption risk sharing as well as allocative efficiency and apply our results to the implicit transfers generated by a potential European unemployment benefit scheme (EUBS). Specifically, we first develop a simple model...

We study whether a democracy improves a measure of individual wellbeing; human heights. Drawing on individual-level datasets, we test the hypothesis using a battery of eight different measures of democracy and derived averages, and include models accounting for several confounders, regional and...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

Due to the complexity of employment protection legislation (EPL) in Germany, there is notable uncertainty about the outcomes of dismissal conflicts. In this study we focus on severance pay and inquire whether its incidence and level varies in a systematic manner with the legal rules as defined...

We derive exact conditions relating the distributions of firm productivity, sales, output, and markups to the form of demand in monopolistic competition. Applications include a new “CREMR” demand function (Constant Revenue Elasticity of Marginal Revenue): it is necessary and sufficient for...

How do short and long term interest rates respond to a jump in financial uncertainty? We address this question by conducting a local projections analysis with US monthly data, period: 1962-2018. The state-of-the-art financial uncertainty measure proposed by Ludvigson, Ma, and Ng (2019) is found...