Solid budgets serve as important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians might therefore face an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regarded as a key element for budget setups. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, in this study we systematically...

We examine whether German state governments manipulated fiscal forecasts before elections. Our data set includes three fiscal measures over the period 1980-2014. The results do not show that electoral motives influenced fiscal forecasts in West German states. By contrast, East German state...

This paper documents the existence of Political Forecast Cycles. In a theoretical model of political selection, we show that governments release overly optimistic GDP growth forecasts ahead of elections to increase the reelection probability. The bias arises from lack of commitment if voters are...

Contrary to the number of unemployed or vacancies, the number of employees subject to social security contribu-tions (SSC) for Germany is published after a time lag of 2 months. Furthermore, there is a waiting period of 6 months until the values are not revised any more. This paper uses monthly...