I investigate the causal effect of access to relevant local television on i) U.S. citizens' knowledge of their senators' actions in the Senate and ii) whether citizens hold their senators accountable for these actions. To do so, I utilize the mismatch between the local television markets and the...

Industrial policy is back on the agenda and the consensus is that it must be different "this time" from the past. We redefine industrial policy for industrialised countries as a strategy to promote "high-road competitiveness", understood as the ability of an economy to achieve "Beyond-GDP"...

The conventional wisdom is that increasing globalisation requires a reduction in the provision of the welfare state among industrialised countries as the distortions resulting from this type of expenditure undermine international competitiveness and the ability of countries to attract and/or...

We explain economic growth by both politics, i.e. government activity including spending as well as regulation, and institutional quality and its interaction with politics. This extends previous work on institution building in transition by looking at its impact and, at the same time,...

Aid is said to be fungible at the aggregate level if it raises government expenditures by less than the total amount. This happens when the recipient government decreases domestic revenue, decreases net borrowing, or when aid bypasses the budget. This study makes three contributions to both...

Ende Juni 2013 hat die Europäische Kommission Leitlinien für Regionalbeihilfen für den Zeitraum 2014 bis 2020 verabschiedet. Der Autor argumentiert, dass diese Leitlinien stellenweise weder mit der ökonomischen Theorie noch mit verwandten Leitlinien und Mitteilungen der Kommission in...

Following ECB-president Draghi's remark that the European Social Model does no longer exist and the crisis can only be overcome through a combination of austerity and structural reform, this paper examines the consequences of austerity measures and structural reforms adopted during the crisis in...

We extend previous literature on fiscal policy sustainability by introducing non-linear fiscal reaction functions with endogenously estimated state-varying thresholds to capture the behaviour of fiscal policy authorities during "good" and "bad" times. These thresholds vary with the level of...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...

We set up a general model on capital mobility which contains many of the models in the literature as special cases. The race to the bottom results not from a capital flight effect, but rather from a kind of Laffer curve effect in public good provision. Selectively introducing simplifying...