Nachdem die chinesische Volkswirtschaft im Verlauf der 1990er Jahre zur Werkbank der Welt” aufgestiegen war, ist angesichts massiv ausgeweiteter F&E Budgets in den letzten Jahren die Frage aufgekommen, inwiefern China in naher Zukunft nicht auch zur Wissensfabrik der Welt aufsteigen könnte....

This paper empirically analyzes the question whether government involvement in the economy is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. This provides a test of a longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory, which predicts that...

Over the past two decades, reliance on short-term contracted staff has increased in government institutions across the Western world. This tendency towards contracted government may be strengthened during periods of economic and financial stress. This article therefore poses the following...

We study the effect of political polarization on government spending and redistribution using the dispersion of self-reported political preferences as our measure of polarization. Politically polarized countries have lower levels of redistribution and government consumption. The relationship...

We present a theory to explain government procrastination as a consequence of its present-bias resulting from the political uncertainty in a two-party political system. We show that under a two-party political system the party in office tends to be present-biased. This may lead to inefficient...

We analyze whether or not the globalization of capital, disciplines governments and improves governance. We demonstrate that globalization affects governance, by increasing a country's vulnerability to sudden capital flight. This increased threat of capital flight can discipline governments and...