This paper analyzes the link between inflation and democracy in developing countries. In order to address the endogeneity issue of democracy, I use the date of political independence as an instrument for democratic institutions. The application of the criterion of Stock and Yogo (2002, 2005) for...

We consider a model of redistributive politics in which politicians have the possibility to raise some debt and to implement a pie-increasing reform, i.e. a reform creating a net increase in the total taxable endowment. The reform benefits occur in the future and the reform costs have to be paid...

We use a large and unexplored dataset covering all mainland Portuguese municipalities from 1979 to 2001 to evaluate the impact of political forces in the allocation of grants from the central government to local authorities. Empirical results clearly show that, besides variables that proxy the...

The political article tests for rational political business cycles models on an unexplored and large data set of Portuguese municipalities. This data allows for a clean test of the models due to its high level of detail on expenditure items, an exogenous fixed election schedule and the...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council's voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...

Recently, the channels of citizen participation in Germany with regard to governmental processes are subject to change. Classical interaction between politicians and citizens still takes place. However, there are new tools for participation at hand as well. One interesting channel that attracted...

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

Retrospective voting may be an effective instrument for overcoming moral hazard of politicians if voters evaluate the performance of elected representatives correctly. Whether democratic experience helps them to properly assess a policymaker's performance is less well understood. We analyze...

We apply the difference-in-discontinuities design to disentangle the fiscal effects the governance system conditional on electoral systems. We take advantage of a natural experiment, which involves two institutional reforms in Poland. Our results indicate that a change from parliamentary to...