Does increasing transparency improve fiscal policy behavior of local governments? One way this could take place is via Yardstick Competition between incumbents of neighboring municipalities. This paper contributes to the literature by introducing a simple model which employs probabilistic voting...

This paper measures the causal effect of coalition vs. single-party governments on fiscal policies using a data set of 396 municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in the time period 1985-2004. Using a regression discontinuity design to take the endogeneity of the type of...

Kaldor's Laws, regarding relationships between output, employment and productivity in manufacturing are estimated with Kreis-data of the Bundesländer Hessen, Nordrhein- Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz and Saarland between 1980-92 by estimation methods considering the presence of spatial...