This paper examines whether government ideology influenced the allocation of public expenditures on education and cultural affairs in the West German states in the 1974-2006 period. I explicitly consider the allocation of policy responsibilities between the federal and the states’ governments....

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

Two hypotheses relate to the globalization-welfare state nexus: the efficiency hypothesis predicts that globalization reduces government sector size and governments’ capacity to finance the welfare state. The compensation hypothesis, in contrast, predicts that globalization induces a higher...

This paper examines how government ideology has influenced deregulation of product markets in OECD countries. I analyze a dataset of non-manufacturing regulation indicators covering energy, transport and communication industries in 21 OECD countries over the 1980-2003 period and employ two...

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 study finds that countries with high-IQ populations enjoy less corruption. I propose that this is because intelligent people have longer time horizons.

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...

We empirically assess the influence of globalization on social institutions that govern female subjugation and gender equality in developing countries. Observing the progress of globalization for almost one hundred developing countries at ten year intervals starting in 1970, we find that...

This paper empirically evaluates whether government Ideology andelectoral motives influenced the growth of public health expenditures in18 OECD countries over the 1971-2004 period The results suggest thatincumbents behaved opportunistically and increased the growth of publichealth expenditures...