The ongoing coronavirus pandemic crisis as well as demographic and climate change pose major challenges for public finances. This article deals with the implications of demographic trends in Switzerland, i.e. the progressive ageing of the population and its impact on the country's public...

A better understanding of the determinants of public health care expenditures is key to designing effective health policies. We integrate supply and demand-side determinants, factors from political economy and health policy reforms into an empirical analysis of the highly decentralized Swiss...

Fiscal rules are argued to be important for sound and sustainable fiscal policies and have been increasingly adopted over the last 20 years. However, as increased fiscal pressure and fiscal risks urge countries to address the public debt legacy left by recent economic crises, fiscal rules come...

This paper addresses the personal linkages between the public administration and the legislature that emerge because public servants pursue a political mandate. There are concerns that the strong representation of bureaucrats in many Western parliaments compromises the constitutionally proposed...

Countries differ substantially in how they deal with politicians that come from the public sector. Most constitutions include incompatibility and ineligibility rules due to concerns about conflicts of interest and the politicization of the public service. We study how these rules affect the...

Senior officials in the ministerial bureaucracy are responsible for the coordination of public service activity and their number has grown enormously since World War II. We study the growth in employment of this politically sensitive high-profile occupational group from a political economics...

We study the harmonization of the base remuneration for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were previously paid like national parliamentarians implying large differences between the delegations from the 27 member countries. Based on detailed information on individual MEPs between...

Traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents. However, as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of...

A better understanding of the determinants of public health care expenditures is key to designing effective health policies. We integrate supply and demand-side determinants, factors from political economy and health policy reforms into an empirical analysis of the highly decentralized Swiss...