This paper explores the nuanced relationship between fiscal decentralization and fiscal sustainability. Employing panel data analyses, it scrutinizes how decentralization influences fiscal discipline across different governmental levels. Results for 185 countries show that while tax...

This paper describes the empirical evidence on partisan politics in OECD panel studies. I elaborate on the research designs, the measurement of government ideology and why the empirical studies do not and cannot derive causal effects. Discussing about 100 panel data studies, the results indicate...

We examine the extent to which government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries since the 1970s. In line with important changes in the global economy and differences across countries, regression results yield heterogeneous inferences depending on the time period and the...

Previous studies used general government data to examine whether national governments' electoral motives and ideology influenced budget composition in OECD countries. General government data includes, however, the state and local level. Using new data for general and central government over the...

I examine whether elections influence perceived corruption in the public sector. Perceived corruption in the public sector is measured by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption Index (CPI). The dataset includes around 100 democracies over the period 2012-2016, a...

We examine whether US and German state governments pursue sustainable fiscal policies taking into account fiscal transfers. Using panel data techniques we investigate whether the debt-to-GDP ratio had a positive influence on the primary surplus (Bohn-model). We show that including/excluding...

In this paper, we extend Henning Bohn's (2008) fiscal sustainability test by allowing for slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence (CD). In particular, our econometric approach is the first that allows fiscal reaction functions (FRF) to capture unobserved heterogeneous effects from...

Under correlated heterogeneity, the commonly used two-way fixed effects estimator is biased and can lead to misleading inference. This paper proposes a new trimmed mean group (TMG) estimator which is consistent at the irregular rate of n 1/3 even if the time dimension of the panel is as small as...

This paper considers spatial autoregressive panel data models and extends their analysis to the case where the spatial coefficients differ across the spatial units. It derives conditions under which the spatial coefficients are identified and develops a quasi maximum likelihood (QML) estimation...

This paper develops an estimator for higher-order spatial autoregressive panel data error component models with spatial autoregressive disturbances, SARAR(R,S). We derive the moment conditions and optimal weighting matrix without distributional assumptions for a generalized moments (GM)...