This paper analyzes government commitments to ongoing spending programs that require future outlays. Spending commitments are important for understanding partisan politics because they constrain future governments. In a model with one government good, a “stubborn liberal” policy maker can...

In this paper, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal government's competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes to find out how the enfranchisement of women influences public support for government spending. The first ballot...

Using a new dataset of Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. Our analysis is novel in two ways: first, we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity; second, we combine a new instrument with fixed effects to...

We address the problem of how to investigate whether economics, or politics, or both, matter in the explanation of public policy. The problem is first posed in a particular context by uncovering a political business cycle (using Canadian data for 130 years) and by taking up the challenge to make...

Formal fiscal rules have been introduced in many countries throughout the world. While most studies focus on intra‐jurisdictional effects of fiscal rules, vertical impacts on the finances of other levels of governments have yet to be explored thoroughly. The paper investigates the influence of...

If people understand that some macroeconomic policies are unsustainable, why would they vote for them in the first place? We develop a political economy theory of the endogenous emergence of fiscal crises, based on the idea that the adjustment mechanism to a crisis favors some social groups,...