The social impact of sanitation is multifaceted. It has repercussions for health, education, and the local environment, as well as overall human development and economic growth. Unsafe sanitation poses environmental and health risks. In light of the health hazards, the Government of India has...

Using a new dataset of Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. Our analysis is novel in two ways: first, we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity; second, we combine a new instrument with fixed effects to...

We analyze potential effects of demographic change and political constellations on higher education spending. In our panel analysis of west German states (Laender) for the period 1985 to 2002 we find empirical evidence for the hypothesis of a negative relationship between demographic aging and...