We examine whether government ideology was correlated with the growth in military expenditure in Germany over the period 1951-2011. By using various measures of government ideology, the results do not show any effect. The exception is an ideology measure based on the Comparative Manifesto...

Economists, and also economic research institutes, differ in their attitudes towards desirability of economic policies. The policy positions taken can often be determined by ideology. We examine economic policy positions by investigating minority votes in the Joint Economic Forecast of German...

In January 2005 the German Supreme Court permitted the state governments to charge tuition fees. By exploiting the natural experiment, we examine how government ideology influenced the introduction of tuition fees. The results show that rightwing governments were active in introducing tuition...

In 2009 a new law on German debt brakes was passed: state governments are not allowed to run structural deficits after 2020. Consolidation strategies initiated today influence if a state can comply with the debt brake in 2020. We describe to what extent government ideology predicts if state...

We examine whether German state governments manipulated fiscal forecasts before elections. Our data set includes three fiscal measures over the period 1980-2014. The results do not show that electoral motives influenced fiscal forecasts in West German states. By contrast, East German state...

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...