Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on local and international tax competition in Economics. Based on this survey, we discuss whether EU countries should harmonize tax policies to prevent a race to the bottom. Much of the evidence suggests that tax competition does not lead to...

In 2001, the state parliament of the German federal state of Hesse abolished a 5 percent legal electoral threshold for local elections. This reform had a stronger effect on municipalities with larger councils because implicit electoral thresholds decrease with council size. Exploiting...

We find that policy decisions made by elected politicians in Portuguese municipalities violate the predictions of standard microeconomic theory. Municipalities can choose a withholding rate between zero and five percent of the income tax revenue collected within their boundaries by the national...

This study investigates the impact of electing a majority in a municipality's legislative body on different items of the local current and capital accounts. Inference is based on a RDD approach and a dataset containing electoral and financial information for a sample of 278 homogeneous...

The share of women in political offices has increased considerably over the past few decades in almost every country in the world. Does this matter for policy outcomes? This is the first paper to provide a literature review on the substantive effects of female representation on policies. In...

The share of women in political offices has increased considerably over the past few decades in almost every country in the world. Does this matter for policy outcomes? This is the first paper to provide a literature review on the substantive effects of female representation on policies. In...

I exploit an exogenous reform introducing a local business tax in Portugal to study tax mimicking among jurisdictions. The identification strategy relies on a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences methodology and heterogeneity in treatment intensity. Results show evidence of significant...

We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers’ place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994–2013, we find that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher...

We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers’ place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994–2013, we find that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher...