The goal of this paper is twofold: First, to develop an estimable model of legislative politics in the US Congress, second, to provide a greater understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the theoretical model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

Using a modified version of Wagner's Law, this paper sets to analyze the determinants of government expenditure in Kenya. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was used to analyze time-series data for the period 1970 and 2017. The study finding reveals that GDP, population, trade openness,...

We link governments’ spending efficiency scores, to sovereign debt assessments made by financial markets´, more specifically by three rating agencies (Standard & Poors, Moody´s and Fitch). Public efficiency scores are computed via data envelopment analysis. Then, we rely notably on ordered...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional...

The government fragmentation hypothesis (GFH) states that coalition governments spend more than single-party governments due to an underlying common pool problem. Using a large panel data set on 604 local governments in the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the 1994-2014 period, I test the...

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...

Florian Dorn erstellte diesen Beitrag während seines Promotionsstudiums an der Universität München (LMU). Die Studie wurde im September 2020 abgeschlossen und von der Fakultät für Volkswirtschaftslehre als Dissertation angenommen. Die Dissertation trägt zur Empirie der Ökonomie des...