Health care expenditure has increased substantially in all Western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...

Several recent studies suggest that transfers from central to regional governments are motivated by political considerations. In this paper we examine if this is also the case for transfers from regional to central governments in the context of the German fiscal equalization system. We examine...

In this paper we examine whether partisan influence on social expenditure in the OECD has decreased over the past three decades. We analyze whether a reduced partisan influence is due to more trade openness, larger budget deficits or the creation of new supranational institutions. Our empirical...