A lack of transparency about policy performance can pose a major obstacle to welfare-enhancing policy competition across jurisdictions. In parallel surveys with German citizens and state parliamentarians, we document that both groups misperceive the performance of their state's education system....

The literature on socio economic implications of fiscal decentralization (FD) has recently been expanding, though only very few studies to day have looked at its macroeconomic effects. This paper investigates the relationship between FD and budget deficits. Using various measures of both...

This paper extends the game-theoretic model of Von Hagen and Harden (1995) that analyzes the impact of fiscal discipline on budgetary outcomes.It analyzes the effects on budgetary outcomes of both fiscal and monetary discipline, which are evaluated with respect to the relevant institutional...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

The ifo Education Survey is a representative opinion survey of the German voting-age population on education topics that has been conducted annually since 2014. It covers public preferences on a wide range of education policy issues ranging from early childhood education, schools, and...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters' preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates' policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...