Through an intertemporal budget constraint, jurisdictions may gain advantages in tax and spending competition by 'competing' on debt. While the existing spatial econometric literature focuses on tax and spending competition, very little is known about spatial interaction via public debt. This...

In this paper, we analyze politicians’ expectations about future compliance with a fiscal rule, and in particular the dependence of the expectations on their role in parliament (opposition vs. incumbent government coalition). In addition, we explore how opposition and incumbent politicians...

This paper examines the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle of international capital flows referring to a panel data set of EMU countries and major industrialized and emerging economies. Overall, the results do not provide evidence in favour of the Lucas Paradox and the Allocation Puzzle....

Despite strongly equalized per capita revenue and similar budgetary institutions, fiscal performance is increasingly diverging across German federal states. Given that state and local governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this paper investigates whether the composition of...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide opportunities for a more flexible and market-based provision of public services. At the same time, they may impair fiscal transparency and offer politicians discretion in the presence of strict fiscal rules if these only constrain the core udget. Using a...

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper...

The manufacturing sector accounts for a substantial share of German GDP, employment and carbon emissions. Therefore, the manufacturing sector's energy use and carbon emissions are of crucial importance for reaching Germany's climate goals. In this paper, we analyse energy use patterns in German...

Drastic emission reductions are necessary to combat climate change. However, despite several climate policies, carbon emissions from German manufacturing have actually increased between 2005 and 2017. In this paper, we provide evidence of how the policy mix overall has affected the German...

This paper investigates the evolution of aggregate productivity and markups among French manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2016, by focusing on the role of reallocation with respect to both aggregate measures. Firm-level productivity and markups are estimated based on a gross output translog...

Relative prices determine competitiveness of different locations. In this paper, we focus on the role of regulatory differences between Germany and other EU countries which affect the shadow price of carbon emissions. We calibrate a Melitz-type model, extended by firms’ emissions and abatement...