Government is often considered the safe sector of an open economy that provides households with insurance against external risk exposure. Among highly integrated economies, however, households should be able to exploit common financial markets to insure themselves. In this paper we examine the...

Does trade openness systematically imply bigger governments, as proposed by Rodrik (1998)? This paper presents a novel and more refined explanation for when and why international trade may enlarge the public sector. We propose that trade openness is associated with bigger governments if (i) the...

We study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the London Metropolitan Boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes: taxpayer suffrage (1902-1914) and universal suffrage (1921-1937). We argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates...

In this paper we investigate the interplay between national rainy-day funds and supra-national transfers in a fiscal union. Given that the EU has established rules limiting deficits, national rainy-day funds could in theory provide a way for countries to obey the rules and use fiscal policy, yet...

In this paper, we present and illustrate novel data on more than a century of regulation in Switzerland. We provide quantitative measures for Swiss cantons on the annual stock of legally binding rules from 2006-2013 and on regulatory activity as reflected in the annual changes to such regulation...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped public policies and government finances, it has also influenced the topics that public finance economists are researching. Because the 2020 International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF) Congress featured papers that were submitted prior to the start of the...

This paper studies how divided government - arising when control of the government branches is split between parties - affects the polarization of the legislature and policy implementation. Using data on electoral and legislative outcomes for US states and a regression-discontinuity design, we...

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a simple theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency...

This paper studies theoretically and empirically competition in commodity taxation and product market regulation between trading partner countries. We present a two-country general equilibrium model in which destination-based commodity taxes finance public goods, and product market regulation...

This paper studies how political fragmentation affects government stability. We show that each additional party with representation in Parliament increases the probability that the incumbent government is unseated by 4 percentage points. Governments with more resources at their disposal for...