The ability of voters to use the available electoral instruments is crucial for the functioning of democracies. The paper shows that voters consider the institutional environment when making electoral decisions. Voters recognize that executives who face binding term limits (i.e., lame ducks)...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behaviour of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institutions by examining the...

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our case studies and quantitative analysis suggest that both politics and fiscal policy...

Even after four decades of research it remains unclear, whether presidential popularity depends on the state of the economy. While about half of all studies for the United States find a significant effect of unemployment and inflation on presidential popularity, the others do not. Additional...

This paper analyzes the constitutional determinants of cost reimbursement rules. In order to design the optimal incentive schemes, a possibly partisan planner will take into account the market cost structure, the institutional design of the supervision hierarchical structure and its technology....

The goal of this paper is twofold: First, to develop an estimable model of legislative politics in the US Congress, second, to provide a greater understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the theoretical model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the...

The budget forms the legal basis of government spending. If a budget is not in place at the beginning of the fiscal year, planning as well as current spending are jeopardized and government shutdown may result. This paper develops a continuous-time war-of-attrition model of budgeting in a...

Zwischenwahlen in den USA sind nicht nur Stimmungsbarometer für den Erfolg einer Präsidentschaft. Die Machtverhältnisse im Kongress entscheiden über den Handlungsspielraum des Präsidenten: Ein divided government - in dem mindestens eine Kammer des Kongresses nicht von der eigenen Partei...