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...

An emerging "clash of civilizations" should reveal itself in patterns of international terror¬ism. Huntington himself explicitly refers to terrorism in the conflict between specific civilizations, and particularly so in the clash between the Islamic civilization and the West. We confront his...

Famine mortality is preventable by government action and yet some famines kill. We develop a political theory of famine mortality based on the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2002, 2003). We argue that it can be politically rational for a government, democratic or not, to remain...

This paper analyzes the impact of the number of parties on turnover rates within an endogenous partisan preference framework. Our results show that the turnover increases in the number of parties under various levels of individual propensity to abstain. We find strong interactions effects...

Robustness tests, which study the frailty of estimates to plausible changes in the specification of empirical models, have become an accepted analytical instrument in quantitative analyses. Surprisingly, however, scholars hardly ever define what they mean by ‘robustness’ and do not agree on...

Premature mortality exhibits strong spatial patterns in Great Britain. Local authorities that are located further North and West, that are more distant from its political centre London and that are more urban tend to have a higher premature mortality rate. Premature mortality also tends to...

Aim: Despite the country’s explicit political goal to establish equivalent living conditions across Germany, significant inequality continues to exist. We argue that premature mortality is an excellent proxy variable for testing the claim of equivalent living conditions since the root causes...

Learning from natural disasters is predominantly regarded as beneficial: Individuals and governments learn to cope and thereby reduce damage and loss of life in future disasters. We argue against this standard narrative and point to two principal ways in which learning from past disasters can...

Objectives. We examined the effects of market income inequality (income inequality before taxes and transfers) and income redistribution via taxes and transfers on inequality in longevity. Methods. We used life tables to compute Gini coefficients of longevity inequality for all individuals and...

Governments can underreport Covid-19 mortality to make their performance appear more successful than it is. Autocracies are more likely to ‘fudge’ these data since many autocratic regimes restrict media freedom and thus can prevent domestic media from reporting evidence of undercounting...