"In political economics, the impact of institutions on income redistribution is mainly studied by comparing different forms of representative democracy. In this article, we analyze the influence of direct democratic institutions on redistribution first focusing on welfare and nonwelfare spending...

Using Allensbach survey data about how people look forward to the coming year, we construct true ex post-forecasts and compare them with the forecasts produced by the German Council of Economic Experts and by the Economic Research Institutes. Then, we perform rationality tests for these forecast...

We look at the relation between democracy and perceived subjective well-being, taking also into account the impact of income and culture. After briefly reviewing the empirical results for Switzerland, we re-estimate this relationship allowing for the relative income position of individuals and...