From an economic perspective, imposing a credible one-off net wealth levy in crisis times as a tool to ward off a national emergency appears to be advantageous as, in an ideal world, this would not distort market players' allocation decisions. However, in practice, charging such a levy may give...

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...

Most EU member states will adopt fiscal rules that refer to cyclically-adjusted borrowing limits. Under the standard cyclical adjustment procedure, trend increases in public debt based on cyclical components are prevented if the real-time output gaps used to calculate cyclical components balance...

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 back ground we analyze the efficiency of 72 public Ger-man universities for the y ears...

Das Humankapital einer Volkswirtschaft ist einer der zentralen Faktoren für das Wirtschaftswachstum. Daher finden nationale Bildungssysteme und die Hochschullandschaft als ein wesentlicher Bestandteil zunehmend Beachtung in der politischen und wissenschaftlichen Debatte. In Zeiten knapper...

This paper examines the effects of demographic change on public finances in a federal system. We develop a simple methodical procedure to measure the effect of demographic changes on public revenues and expenditures. We apply our method to the local, state and federal government sector as well...

We examine the impact of demographic change on the level and the structure of federal, state and local government expenditures in Germany up to the year 2020 by using estimates of the age structure sensitivity of spending in almost 30 functions. Special attention is given to differences between...

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,...

We analyse the adjustment of public education spending in response to rapidly decreasing student cohorts in East Germany where birth rates collapsed after German reunification. Previous results from the literature based on data from more stable demographic periods suggest that public resources...