Conflicts between EU members about enlargement result from its re-distributive effects. EU members are more likely to suffer from enlargement if they profit from EU transfers and if they are relatively close to applicant countries in which unemployment is significantly higher than in member...

German educational spending per student has dramatically declined since the early 1970s. In this paper, we develop a theory of fiscal opportunism and argue that state governments exploit higher educational policies as an instrument of active labor market policy. By 'opening' universities to the...

This paper suggests a three-stage procedure for the estimation of time-invariant and rarely changing variables in panel data models with unit effects. The first stage of the proposed estimator runs a fixed-effects model to obtain the unit effects, the second stage breaks down the unit effects...

The introduction of the Euro has considerably affected the de facto monetary policy autonomy - defined as statistical independence from monetary policy in the key currency areas - in countries outside the European Currency Union. Using a standard open economy framework we argue that de facto...

Traditionally, social scientists perceived causality as regularity. As a consequence, qualitative comparative case study research was regarded as unsuitable for drawing causal inferences since a few cases cannot establish regularity. The dominant perception of causality has changed, however....

The estimation of slowly and rarely changing variables in panel data with unobserved unit effects suffers from inefficiency of the fixed effects estimator. Point estimates lack reliability when the within variance (the variation across time) remains small. The estimate's efficiency can be...

This paper analyzes fiscal competition under budget rigidities and tax equity (fairness norms). We outline a numerically solvable political economic model that treats the outcome of tax competition as one argument in the governments utility function, the others being public expenditure and tax...

This paper analyzes the estimation of time-invariant variables in panel data models with unit-effects. We compare three procedures that have frequently been employed in comparative politics, namely pooled-OLS, random effects and the Hausman-Taylor model, to a vector decomposition procedure that...