The government fragmentation hypothesis (GFH) states that coalition governments spend more than single-party governments due to an underlying common pool problem. Using a large panel data set on 604 local governments in the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the 1994-2014 period, I test the...

State and local government spending has grown at a remarkable pace in the years since World War II. Many states have attempted to arrest this growth by adopting tax or expenditure limitations (TELs). These are formal rules – either codified in statutes or in state constitutions – that limit...

We study to what extent U.S. state tax policy, tax revenues and expenditures are affected by independent political contributions. Using the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling for identification, we study tax policy outcomes in states where independent spending by corporations...

This paper measures the effect of state-level supermajority requirements for tax increases on tax rates. Unobserved attitudes towards taxation tend to influence both the adoption of supermajority requirements and tax policy. Consequently, one cannot distinguish between the effect of these...

We investigate whether trends in job satisfaction, which arguably signal trends in worker well-being, can be explained by changes in the quality of jobs. There were falls in job satisfaction in both Britain and Germany. Elsewhere job satisfaction has been either stable or declining very slowly....

Based on a theoretical model where state limits on local government policy elicit a move from private value (position issue) to common value (valence issue) voting, I exploit exogenous variation in tax limitation rules in over 7,000 Italian municipalities during the 2000s to show that fiscal...

We introduce a new dataset that includes quantitative harmonized indices of tax reforms based on qualitative information of about 900 Economic Surveys from the OECD and 37,000 tax-related news from the IBFD archives. The data set provides indicators on tax reforms for tax rates and tax bases,...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether politicians manipulate the timing of tax rate changes in a strategic way to maximize reelection prospects. To do so, we exploit the German local business tax as a testing ground which is set autonomously by German municipalities. As election dates...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether politicians manipulate the timing of tax rate changes in a strategic way to maximize reelection prospects. To do so, we exploit the German local business tax as a testing ground which is set autonomously by German municipalities. As election dates...