Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

We study the long-run implications of regional and ethnic favoritism in Africa. Combining geocoded individual-level survey data from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with data on national leaders’ birthplaces across 41 African countries, we explore the educational attainment of adults...

We study the economic implications of regional favoritism, a form of distributive politics that redistributes resources spatially within countries. We use a large sample of enterprise surveys spanning across many low and middle income countries, and utilize transitions of national political...

In this paper, we study the extent to which ministers engage in regional favoritism. We are the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of a larger set of the governing elite, not just focusing on the primary leader. We hand-collect birthplaces of this governing elite globally. Combining this...

We simulate the fiscal stimulus packages set up by the German government to allevi-ate the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in a dynamic New Keynesian multi-sectorgeneral equilibrium model. We find that, cumulated over 2020-2022, output lossesrelative to steady state can be reduced by more than 4...

In this paper, we introduce a closed-economy version of the dynamicenvironmental multi-sector general equilibrium modelEMuSeto analyze the effects of financing a labor tax reduction through higher consumption, energy or emissions taxation.We find that, for sufficiently high environmental damage,...

The "true" size of fiscal multipliers is widely debated by economists and policy makers as large (small) multipliers provide arguments to expand (cut) public spending. Within a meta-analytical framework, we ask whether the large observed variance in multiplier estimates can be explained by the...

Since the mid-1970s, firm entry rates in the United States have declined significantly. This also holds for other OECD countries over the past years. At the same time, these economies experienced a gradual process of population aging. Applying a tractable life-cycle model with endogenous firm...