This paper analyses the impact of fiscal rules on different public spending categories, namely public expenditure and investment, at the subnational level in Europe. Building on the notion of the deficit bias, we suspect that in the presence of fiscal rules, politicians have an incentive to...

Theoretical and empirical evidence on the relationship between institutions and economic prosperity remains ambiguous, even though it has been part of scholarly discourse for decades. The present study adds to this discussion by introducing a bundled approach for measuring institutions. This...

While global studies on drivers of economic growth are useful to derive global tendencies, a more insightful analysis that leads to explicit policy implications is possible when investigating smaller entities. In this study, we focus on a panel of 40 African countries located in the Sub-Saharan...

Natural disasters, which usually abruptly cause severe harm and cost lives, have been shown to affect governmental popularity by sometimes leading to additional governmental popularity and sometimes to a loss of popularity. By considering the various theoretical propositions and empirical...

Die deutsche Schuldenbremse wird als Investitionsbremse kritisiert. Fraglich ist insbesondere, ob die Schuldenbremse bei konjunkturellen Schwankungen im Regelfall genügend Spielraum für eine antizyklische Kreditaufnahme lässt. Volkswirtschaftlich wichtige öffentliche Investitionen könnten...

Noch dreht sich die politische Debatte neben den wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Coronavirus vor allem um mögliche Maßnahmen zur Pandemiebekämpfung. Solange das Virus präsent ist, ist die Eindämmung des Infektionsgeschehens vorrangig. Doch bald wird es nicht mehr nur um die Frage gehen,...

We study whether the experience of losing one's job due to the Treuhand activities in the early 1990s affected long-term political behavior among citizens of the former German Democratic Republic. During the German Reunification process, the Treuhand coordinated the privatization of former GDR...

We investigate whether top managers with personal ties to a foreign country facilitate trade with that country by overcoming bilateral trade barriers that obstruct international business relationships. Using individual managers' nationality, we construct a novel database of bilateral top manager...

Why should political parties say what they do not want instead of saying what they want? In this paper, we introduce the concept of negative positioning into spatial models of voting and discuss its relevance as a campaigning tool in European multiparty systems. By negative positioning, we refer...

Why do groups of even well-educated individuals sometimes persistently believe in political myths and ideologies? We follow cognition psychology in its finding that individuals sometimes stick with intuitive but false propositions. We also follow Kahneman, however, in maintaining that they...