We test whether the proactive use of instruments of direct democracy by voters can help to explain fiscal sustainability of 25 Swiss cantons. Using data of all cantonal popular votes since 1977, our results show that the fiscal reaction of cantonal governments to an increase in the debt to GDP...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...

We employ two-stage empirical strategy to analyze the impact of macroeconomic news and central bank communication on the exchange rates of three Central and Eastern European (CEE) currencies against the euro. First we estimate the nominal equilibrium exchange rate based on a monetary model....

Do firms' and consumers' expectations react to central bank announcements? Past literature has come to divergent conclusions, but it has systematically ignored how media treat the announcements. This paper investigates the link between monetary policy announcements and expectations by taking...