Talk about global democracy seems to be fixated on a Reform-Act model of democracy, with 'one person one vote for all affected by the decisions' as for example in a second popularly-apportioned chamber of UN. Politically, that seems wildly unrealistic. But remember that the Reform Acts came very...

This paper summarizes previous results on the productivity of public capital. In recent literature, Aschauer's (1989) estimate for the productivity of public capital is often considered too high and the size of the effect is still open to debate. However, the positive effect of public capital on...

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pan­demic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Swe­den, Switzerland and the UK. We exploit within-country variation in social capital and Covid-19 cases to show that high-social-capital...

The end of communism in the 1990s probably is the most fundamental restructuring of institutions witnessed in recent history. At its core was the large-scale redistribution of previously state-owned companies. We construct a unique firm-level dataset to study this redistribution in East Germany...

Practitioners and scholars of public administration currently seem to have overcome comprehensive reform strategies and are focusing their attention on minor changes in public administration that generate short-term outcomes with lower transactional costs. In that sense, many have argued that...

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...

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...

Multi-agency financial stability committees (FSCs) have grown dramatically since the global financial crisis. However, most cannot direct actions or recommend to other agencies that they take actions, and most would influence policy actions only through convening and discussing risks. We...

Voters dealing with jurisdictional merger decisions face a trade-off between economies of scale and preference costs. Larger jurisdictions may offer cost advantages, yet the downside is that policies in larger units may be less aligned to voter preferences. Our study is the first to provide...

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better economic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and...