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...

Based on probit estimates, this paper analyzes the effects of fiscal consolidation on the prob- ability of sovereign defaults in the short run. Using a panel of 104 developing countries from 1980 to 2009 and controlling for various economic, fiscal and political fa ctors, we find that fiscal...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the influence of income taxes on the choice of residence of taxpayers at the local level. The fact that Swiss communities can individually set tax multipliers thereby shifting the progressive tax scheme which is fixed at the cantonal (state) level...

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...