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...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using an extensive data set on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and...

Auch in Berlin sind öffentliche Investitionen entscheidend für die Lebenszufriedenheit der Menschen und Voraussetzung für eine positive wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. DieBetätigungsfelder für öffentliche Investitionen sind vielfältig. Aufgaben für Berlin sind unter anderem ein...

Die Finanzbeziehungen zwischen Bund und Ländern stehen vor einer umfassenden Reform. Neben einer Neuordnung des Länderfinanzausgleichs diskutiert die Politik derzeit Finanzhilfen für strukturschwache Regionen nach dem Auslaufen des Solidarpakts sowie die Stärkung der allgemeinen Finanzkraft...

In this short note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the social democrats generally profit from higher voter turnout at the expense of the conservatives. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using...

We study political determinants of municipality amalgamations during a boundary reform in the German state of Brandenburg, which reduced the number of municipalities from 1,489 to 421. The analysis is conducted using data on the political decision makers as well as fiscal and socio-economic...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...