This study examines the relationships between democratic politics and systematic (or country-specific) financial risk. Low financial risk is crucial to any well-functioning economy, as it encourages capital investment, facilitates growth, and enhances overall economic performance. Up until now,...

What was the impact of urban political structure on economic inequality in preindustrial times? I document that more closed political institutions were associated with higher economic inequality in a panel of early modern German cities. To investigate the mechanisms behind that...

This volume includes five self-contained chapters in the fields of public debt and fiscal transfer schemes. After an introduction to the topic, chapter 2 shows that the institutional setting of fiscal policy making needs to be considered when assessing the sustainability of fiscal policy. Using...

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from...

The inheritance tax is often seen as an effective tool to reduce wealth inequality, to raise public budgets if needed, and to increase incentives to work by lowering the tax burden on labour, which is especially high in Germany according to the OECD. The purpose of this paper is therefore to...

Although voter turnout in the 2013 general election to the German Bundestag differed considerably across income brackets, the income distribution of voters did not differ, in a statistically significant way, from that of the entire population. The non-uniform turnout, thus, is unlikely to affect...