With the passage of Act 48 in May 2011, Vermont has become the first U.S. state to enact a law for a universal, publicly financed health care system. The state is on course for implementing a single payer system by 2017. This first breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for universal health...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for proclimate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. This paper estimates causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling law...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

This paper investigates the presence of political budget cycles (PBCs) in the European Union using a data set encompassing all 27 current member states over the period 1997-2008, and analyzes what may explain their variability across countries and over time. Conditioning on partisan...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

This essay starts, after a short introduction on the importance and dimensions of "inclusive growth", with a brief empirical sketch on to what extent Europe has already succeeded with respect to this ambitious goal. The result is quite sobering and gives rise to the question: why is it so? The...

It will be argued that it is not of fundamental importance for growth and employment whether the EU clings to the Euro or allows for a dissolution of the Eurozone and a reemergence of national currencies but how multi-level macroeconomic coordination of different policy areas and nation-states...