My empirical results in Potrafke (2012) confirm past conclusions that Muslim-majority countries are less likely to be democratic. Hanusch takes issue with my results-and by inference with all past empirical results on the relation between Islam and democracy. In his comment on my study, Hanusch...

This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on unemployment in a panel of 19 OECD countries for the period 1960-2000. In contrast to many other studies, we use long time series and analyse cyclically adjusted trend values of the unemployment rate. Our novel contribution is...

How do changes in labor market institutions, like more generous unemployment benefits in one country, affect labor market outcomes in other countries? We set up a two-country Armingtonian trade model with frictions on the goods and labor markets. Contrary to the literature, higher labor market...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals’ choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an...

We examine how electoral motives influence active labor market policies that promote (short term) job-creation. Such policies reduce measures of unemployment. Using German state data for the period 1985 to 2004, we show that election-motivated politicians pushed job-promotion schemes before...

Comprehensive reforms often fail, despite being beneficial to society. Politicians may block comprehensive reforms in an attempt to form vote trading coalitions in which they benefit from a piecemeal reform at the expense of others. Because formal commitment devices for vote trading are...

Since 1997, CO2 emissions have continued to rise in many countries despite their emission caps under the Kyoto Protocol (Kyoto). Failure to meet promised targets, however, does not imply that Kyoto has been pointless. Whether Kyoto has made a difference relative to the counterfactual of \"No...