Most EU member states adopt national fiscal rules that refer to cyclically adjusted borrowing limits. Yet, trend increases in public debt caused by the cyclical components are only prevented if the real-time output gaps used to calculate cyclical components balance over time. We analyze...

Efficiency analyses on higher education institutions have so far primarily focussed on the identification of inefficiency and less on the explanation of differences in efficiency performance. In this article, we study the impact of institutional factors on the efficiency of 67 publicly financed...

Due to tight public budget constraints, the efficiency of publicly financed universities in Germany is receiving increasing attention in the academic as well as in the public discourse. Against this background, we analyse the efficiency of 72 public German universities for the years 1998-2003,...

This article examines the effects of demographic change on federal, state, and local government expenditures in Germany to answer the question of whether demographic change will induce vertical fiscal expenditure imbalances. The authors present estimates of the impact of demographic change on...

This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the...