German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments’ vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...

Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public’s monitoring ability. Still, although extensive voter involvement may put...

This paper exploits the introduction of the right of referenda at the local level in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between referenda activity and fiscal performance by using a new...

Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered introduction of this reform allows me to identify the causal effect of increased learning...

For the case of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, production and employment effects of the promotion of renewable energy sources are examined based on a regionalized input-output table. Our findings suggest that policy actions promoting renewable energy types do not necessarily create new...

This paper investigates how local jurisdictions in a federal system influence each other in the adoption of policy innovations. We look at school districts in Michigan and their participation in a public school choice program launched in 1996. Districts' participation decisions are modelled as...

We study the effect of direct democracy on local taxation. Our setting is the German federal state of Bavaria, where in 1995 a state-wide referendum introduced the possibility to initiate direct democratic legislation into the local government code. Relying on a sample of all Bavarian...

This paper measures determinants of individual academic achievements. In addition to an extensive list of individual characteristics, skills obtained during study and socio-economic background factors, many dimensions of selectivity into academic study subjects are shown to drive individual...

Violence at schools is a well-known problem in many societies. This paper assesses the degree of school violence in 11 European countries and analyzes the determinants of being a victim and its effect on student performance. The study draws on the international TIMSS 2003 and the British...