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...

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...

So far no existing study has analyzed what determines people’s trust in the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO even though – in the absence of democratic accountability – this is one of the few ways to assess the legitimacy of these institutions. This study is intended to fill this gap in...

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...

This paper studies the relationship between globalization and the composition of public education expenditures. The theoretical model is embedded in a median voter setting and is based on the assumption that globalization leads to lower tax revenues as well as an increase in the relative wage of...

This paper analyzes the effect of globalization on subjective well-being by using a dataset that combines micro- and macro-level variables for the EU 15 countries from 1975 to 2001. The estimations provide evidence that – in line with theoretical predictions - globalization has benefited...

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...