This paper analyzes the occurrence of political budget cycles in 604 West German cities between 1975 and 2007. Due to the idiosyncratic timing of state and local elections, the budgetary changes before elections at two tiers of the federalist government can be separately estimated and can also...

By applying a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) approach this paper estimates the effects of fiscal policy shocks of different government sub-sectors on aggregate GDP in Germany. From a general government perspective, the results show that besides investment, it is particularly changes in...

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...

This paper addresses the question of how firms react to tax incentives in a formula apportionment (FA) tax regime. Under FA, profits of all consolidated entities of a business group are summed and then allocated according to a formula based on FA factors. We hypothesize that firms may change the...

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to "managerial power" or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S. public...

We review the empirical literature about the implications of the computerization of the labor market to see whether it can explain observed computer adoption patterns and (long-term) changes in the wage structure. Evidence from empirical micro studies turns out to be inconsistent with macro...

We examine theoretically and empirically the properties of the equilibrium wage function and its implications for policy. Our emphasis is on how the researcher approaches economic and policy questions when there is labor market heterogeneity leading to a set of wages. We focus on the application...

This paper presents a model for the heterogeneity and dynamics of the conditional mean and the conditional variance of standardized individual wages. In particular, a heteroskedastic autoregressive model with multiple individual fixed effects is proposed. The expression for a modified likelihood...