There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of direct democracy on redistribution has attracted much less attention. In...

Student achievement has been identified as an important contributor to economic growth. This paper investigates the hypothesis that redistributive government activities have a negative effect on investment in human capital using data from international comparative student achievement tests in...

In this paper we study the determinants of citizens' trust in the European Central Bank during the start-up phase from 1999-2004. Using a country panel based on the Eurobarometer survey, we find that higher inflation rates reduce trust. Thus people appear to evaluate the performance of the ECB...

A long tradition in economics explores the association between the quality of formal institutions and economic performance. The literature on the relationship between such institutions and happiness is, however, rather limited. In this paper, we revisit the findings from recent cross-country...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b)...