After more than five years have passed since the start of the global financial crisis, many European countries are still suffering from financial instability, surging sover- eign debt, economic stagnation or decline, high unemploym ent and political turmoil. We compare consequences and policy...

Dieses Papier untersucht die Stabilisierungswirkung der Schweizer Fiskalpolitik. Erstens zeigt sich, dass in etwa 60% der Fälle die verfolgte Fiskalpolitik des Bundes antizyklisch wirkte. In Rezessionen wirkte die Fiskalpolitik des Bundes immer antizyklisch. Im Falle der Kantone wurden knapp...

Zur Konjunkturstabilisierung haben Regierungen und Notenbanken in den Jahren 2008 und 2009 schnell und entschlossen mit Impulsprogrammen reagiert. Die erhoffte Wirkung blieb nicht aus, indessen wurden mit den staatlichen Eingriffen neue Probleme geschaffen. Die Staatsverschuldung hat einige...

The current debt crisis in many OECD countries calls for adequate strategies in budget consolidation. To regain fiscal solvency many governments base their fiscal adjustments at least partly on spending cuts. A common political claim is that spending cuts rely too much on investment thereby...

The intention of this paper is to analyse how audit courts and local autonomy affect political discussion, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a broad variety of potential factors focusing on Switzerland, due to its variety of audit court competences and its strong decentralised...

ax morale has received a growing attention in academics as well as in public life. The relevance of tax morale for fiscal policy cannot be neglected as tax morale can help to explain the level of tax compliance or tax evasion. This paper gives an overview of tax morale with a special focus on...

Recent empirical literature has shown that the determination of intergovernmental grants is highly influenced by the political bargaining power of the recipient states. In these models federal politicians are assumed to buy the support of state voters, state politicians and state interest groups...

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

Citizens are willing to abandon their short-term financial interest in free-riding considerably, if governments act in their interest, if procedures of the public decisions-making process are felt to be fair and if other fellow-citizens have to contribute also an adequate share to the community....

Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is also a bottom-up approach such as, for example, decentralizing the political power to those who are close to the problems. Thus, this paper analyses the relationship...