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...

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 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...

We present the estimated large-scale three-region DSGE model GEAR picturing Germany, the Euro Area and the Rest of the world. Compared to existing models of this type, GEAR incorporates a comprehensive fiscal block, involuntary unemployment and a complex international structure. We use the model...

In this paper, we assess the impact of major German structural reforms from 1999 to 2008 on key macroeconomic variables. By many, these reforms, especially the Hartz reforms on the labor market, are considered to be the root of observed imbalances in the Euro Area. Our simulations within a...

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 a real business cycle model with labor market frictions, we find that a more progressive tax schedule reduces structural unemployment as it fosters long-run incentives for job creation. Because there exists an optimal level of unemployment in a matching environment ("Hosios condition), tax...

In this article, we present a model that can account for the changes in the Germancurrent account balance since the 2000s. Our results suggest that an array of struc-tural tax and labor market reforms (Agenda 2010), population aging and pensionreforms led to an increase in the household savings...

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...