In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

This paper explores the role of information transmission and misaligned interests across levels of government in explaining variation in the degree of decentralization across countries. Within a two-sided incomplete information principal-agent framework, it analyzes two alternative...

According to the disciplining hypothesis, globalization restrains governments by inducing increased budgetary pressure. As a consequence, governments shift their expenditures in favour of transfers and subsidies and away from capital expenditures. This expenditure shift is potentially enhanced...

This paper develops a model for dynamic binary choice panel data that allows for unobserved heterogeneity to be arbitrarily correlated with covariates. The model is of the exponential type. We derive moment conditions that enable us to eliminate the unobserved heterogeneity term and at the same...

In this paper we analyse the short- and long-run relationship between employment growth, inflation and output growth in Phillips' tradition. For this purpose we apply FMOLS, DOLS, PMGE, MGE, DFE, and VECM methods to a nonstationary heterogeneous dynamic panel including annual data for 119...

This paper investigates the long-run effects of public debt and inflation on economic growth. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop a cross-sectionally augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) approach to the estimation of long-run effects in dynamic...

Using bootstrap panel analysis, allowing for cross-country correlation, without the need of pre-testing for unit roots, we study the causality between government spending and revenue for the EU in the period 1960-2006. We find spend-and-tax causality for Italy, France, Spain, Greece, and...

This paper contributes to the GMM literature by introducing the idea of self-instrumenting target variables instead of searching for instruments that are uncorrelated with the errors, in cases where the correlation between the target variables and the errors can be derived. The advantage of the...