The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can raise their reputation purely with new or more...

Currently, background, qualification and training of German top politicians are widely discussed by scholars and media. This paper provides new insights to this discussion by analysing significant differences between the chancellors, vice chancellors as well as ministers of the inner residual...

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from...