Members of parliament (MPs) often decide on their own salaries. Voters dislike self-serving politicians, and politicians are keen to gratify their voters. In line with the political business cycle theories, politicians thus may well delay deciding on increases in salaries until after elections....

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 investigate whether left-wing governments decrease wage inequality among civil servants. The data is based on salaries of civil servants in the German states. Since a reform in 2006, German state governments are allowed to design salaries of civil servants. We employ encompassing data for pay...

We investigate whether left-wing governments decrease wage inequality among civil servants. The data is based on salaries of civil servants in the German states. Since a reform in 2006, German state governments are allowed to design salaries of civil servants. We employ encompassing data for pay...

Previous theoretical and empirical research has shown that policymakers have an incentive to centralize government activities in order to weaken the com-petitive pressure of fiscal federalism. We propose and test a positive model of fiscal federalism in which centralization is less likely to...

The standard model of strategic tax competition assumes that government policymakers are perfectly benevolent, acting solely to maximize the utility of the representative resident in their jurisdiction. We depart from this assumption by allowing for the possibility that policymakers also may be...

In Switzerland, two key church institutions - the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) - make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations' power to shape...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

We study distributive politics inside cities by analysing how local governments allocate investment projects to voters across neighbourhoods. In particular, we ask whether politicians use investment to target their own supporters. To this aim, we use detailed geo-located investment data from...

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of local corruption on political participation which is mediated by the press. Focusing on Italy, we generate a daily measure of exposition to local corruption screening articles of main Italian press agency. Applying an event-study methodology on...