This paper estimates the effect of political power on tax policies in municipal councils under a proportional election system. The main challenge in estimating the causal effect of parties on policy is to isolate the effect of power from underlying voter preferences and the selection effect of...

Do incumbents in an election have an advantage, and if so, are these advantages heterogeneous across parties or government and opposition? We first present a theoretical discussion on the possible heterogeneity of incumbency effects in a pure two-party system. Then, we estimate the incumbency...

This paper explores the interdependency of political institutions from the voter's perspective. Specifically, we are interested in three questions: (1) Does the partisan identity of the local mayor influence the voter's decision in the subsequent town council election?; (2) Does this partisan...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...

Ein Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) ist ein staatliches Förderprogramm in der EU, in dessen Rahmen die teilnehmenden Mitgliedstaaten mit eigenen Mitteln Forschung und Innovation privater Unternehmen in den eigenen Grenzen unterstützen können. Die zentrale Frage, die sich...

Support schemes for unemployed persons aiming to become self-employed have been recently reformed several times. In 2003, the "start-up-subsidy" (Existenzgründungszuschuss) was added to the existing "bridging-allowance" (Überbrückungsgeld) and the two programs to-gether led to a strong...

Der Länderfinanzausgleich soll reformiert werden, da er mit den bestehenden Regeln nach 2019 ausläuft. Entsprechend werden aktuell verschiedene Vorschläge und deren Auswirkungen diskutiert. In diesem Beitrag kommt der Wirtschaftskraft - gemessen auf Basis der Bruttowertschöpfung - die Rolle...