The role of government in the process of globalization has been discussed extensively in recent years. The two “rivaling” theories that best reflect conventional wisdom are the “efficiency” and the “compensation” hypothesis. With regard to the compensation hypothesis, I challenge...

The objective of this paper is to explore various relationships between self-reported life satisfaction and state public finance in the U.S. The paper focuses on both government expenditure and revenue (especially tax) structures. This paper is the first of its kind to examine the relationship...

Institutions are common predictors of voter turnout. Most research in this field focuses on cross-country comparisons of voting systems, like the impact of compulsory voting or registration systems. Fewer efforts have been devoted to understand the role of local institutions and their impact on...

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglect possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. The paper addresses...

Wagner's Law would imply an exponential growth process of the ratio between public expenditures and national income (G/Y). However the law may be rejected both on theoretical and empirical reasons, because it disregards the role of ever increasing distortionary taxation. But, under some...

The current paper reveals evidence consistent with social promotion in Ohio's central city public schools. Relative to rural school districts, there is something about central city schools that makes their students perform worse on the state proficiency test. However, this same something makes...

The current paper reveals evidence consistent with social promotion in Ohio's central city public schools. Relative to rural school districts, there is something about central city schools that makes their students perform worse on the state proficiency test. However, this same something makes...

German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments' vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...

Capitalization of fiscal packages at the local level is often criticized as a demand side phenomenon. We provide a theoretical model in which capitalization depends on the elasticity of housing supply and demand. When supply is perfectly elastic, capitalization does not persist over time. Using...

We implement a one-week partial sleep restriction protocol to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on joint production in a standard voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) experiment. Additionally, the effect of sleep restriction on an individual's likelihood of sending costly peer...