We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993-2009 period. We employ the new data on the ideological mapping of US...

In this paper we propose a reform of the EU financing system. The two most important elements of our proposal are i) to make the contribution of taxpayers to the EU budget more visible by showing an EU VAT share on receipts and ii) to increase the power of the European Parliament in the...

The literature on estimating macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy requires suitable instruments to identify exogenous and unanticipated spending shocks. So far, the instrument of choice has been military build-ups. This instrument, however, largely limits the analysis to the US as few other...

We investigate the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in Korea. We compare results obtained with two alternative approaches: the narrative approach and Structural Vector-Autoregressive model (SVAR). We propose a new methodology for identifying exogenous and unexpected fiscal...

We estimate the fiscal multiplier associated with shocks to government spending. We consider increases in government spending in the U.S. states in the wake of natural disasters to capture spending shocks that are both unexpected and unrelated to the preceding state of the economy. We find that...

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of total government spending. By employing both time-series and province-level panel data,...

This paper investigates the impact of the intensity of political competition on the leviathan behavior by political incumbents. Using panel data from German municipalities, we test whether the relative political strength of parties in local councils influences the spending behavior of...