We examine whether changes of government influence compliance with international agreements. We investigate compliance with the NATO two percent target to which all NATO countries committed themselves during the NATO summit in Wales in 2014. The dataset includes the military expenditure by NATO...

Scholars have estimated demand functions for national defense spending and investigated international arms trade for a long time. The relationship between supply and demand for military goods has, however, only been examined on aggregate level or in formal models yet. I investigate how the...

I investigate how the third wave of democracy influenced national defense spending by using a panel of 110 countries for the period 1972-2013. I use new SIPRI data on military expenditure, which has been extended to years prior to 1988 and four democracy measures to address differences among...

We examine how political institutions influence health expenditure by using a panel of 151 developing and developed countries for the years 2000 to 2015 and four measures of democracy. Our pooled OLS analysis shows that democracies have 20-30% higher government health expenditure relative to GDP...

The beauty premium in politics shows that attractive politicians are more likely to get elected to office than less attractive politicians, but little is known about whether beauty also shapes the behavior of members of parliament (MPs) once in office. We use newly collected data on the...

A widespread concern is that labor market institutions erode in the course of globalization, which, in turn, decreases employment and wages. By using panel data and crosssectional data, I investigate the influence of globalization on labor market regulation. I use the indicators of labor market...

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993-2009 period. We employ the new data onthe ideological mapping of US...

Fiscal sustainability tests have largely ignored the institutional setting of fiscal policy making. Fiscal equalization schemes in federal states are one such institution. We examinewhether German state governments pursue sustainable fiscal policies taking intoaccount fiscal equalization...

In January 2005 the German Supreme Court permitted the state governments to chargetuition fees. By exploiting the natural experiment, we examine how government ideologyinfluenced the introduction of tuition fees. The results show that rightwing governmentswere active in introducing tuition fees....

I investigate minority votes in the German Council of Economic Experts. The dataset contains information on the voting behavior of the council members over the period 1971-2011. The results show that the best predictor of minority voting is being nominated by the trade unions: a council member...