Governments around the globe are opening up public spending data in order to promote transparency and citizen awareness. However, data openness by itself is not enough to guarantee that the data is consumed efficiently and in meaningful ways. In this work public spending data from seven...

Using an estimation method developed by Blanchard and Wolfers (2000) we study whether the size of a country's legislature impacts its fiscal response to common and country-specific shocks. The use of this method allows us to estimate the effects of legislature size while also controlling for...