German fiscal policy is nowadays often presented as a shining example due to successful budget consolidation after the Great Recession. However, the idea that the German success is the result of a well-thought-out economic strategy that could therefore serve as a role model for other countries...

The government's financial policy always has distributive effects which are, however, difficult to estimate in the individual case. The past 15 years in the Federal Republic of Germany have been determined by a strong shift of the distributive relations for the benefit of profit income; this...

The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

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...

Verminderte Steuereinnahmen und die defizitäre Lage der öffentlichen Haushalte haben eine Diskussion über Steuererhöhungen ausgelöst. Dass die vorgesehenen Maßnahmen ökonomisch sinnvoll und in der aktuellen Wirtschaftslage angemessen sind, bezweifelt Prof. Dr. Clemens Fuest, Universität...