In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

We apply the difference-in-discontinuities design to disentangle the fiscal effects of the governance system conditional on electoral systems. We take advantage of a natural experiment, which involves two institutional reforms at the local level in Poland. The first reform introduced two...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of two key expenditure categories (current and public investment spending) during the different phases of the business cycle (good times and bad times). Anecdotal evidence suggests that policymakers usually cannot resist the temptation of spending more...