Do incentives and policy choices of public officials depend on whether they are appointed by an elected body or directly elected by voters? I investigate this question using the example of state grants for highly visible municipal investment projects. To attract these grants, mayors must prepare...

This paper investigates how government ideology and inflation affect the government’s choice between cash transfers and in-kind transfers. Our hypotheses are based on three observations: (i) in-kind transfers create stigma, (ii) but make recipients less vulnerable to inflation; (iii) poor...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and the composition of public expenditures. First, I derive a theoretical model that links the degree of corruption in a country - to be understood as the prevailing culture of corruption - to distortions in the budget composition. The...

One possible explanation for the European sovereign debt crises is that the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) gave rise to consolidation fatigue or even deliberate over-borrowing. This paper explores the validity of this explanation by studying how three decisive stages in the history...

This paper identifies a novel political-economy explanation for the observed variation in the cash and in-kind (basic health care, public housing or food stamps) mixture of social transfers. We put forward the hypothesis that the share of in-kind transfers is positively correlated with...

We study partisan favoritism in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. Our dataset combines local council election data with fiscal data on grant allocations in the German state of Hesse. Our identification strategy is a regression discontinuity design that relies on a perturbation...

Theoretical models predict that globalization changes the nature of collective bargaining. Yet, the extant empirical evidence is inconclusive. We investigate the influence of globalization on three aspects of collective bargaining (degree of decentralization, union density, extent of government...

Why are so many EU countries currently in dire fiscal straits? A popular explanation is that monetary unification led to bailout expectations, which in turn resulted in soft budget constraints and over-borrowing. This paper investigates the validity of this explanation by studying the effects of...

We study the effects of random assignment to coeducational and single-sex classes on the academic performance of female high school students. Our estimation results show that single-sex schooling improves the performance of female students in mathematics. This positive effect increases if the...

This paper studies the effect of globalization on public expenditures allocated to different stages of education. First, we derive theoretically that globalization’s influence on education expenditures depends on the type of government. For benevolent governments, the model suggests that...