We study the local favoritism of appointed German state ministers. Matching hand-collected data on ministers' place of residence to a sample of more than 8,000 west German municipalities during the period 1994-2013, we find that the home municipality of a state minister experiences higher...

Politicians are expected to influence policy outcomes in a way to gain electoral advantage. There is, however, a pending question whether efficiency in the provision of public goods and services is affected by strategic behavior. I examine how electoral cycles influence local government...

We examine whether the sorting of differently achieving students into differently sized classes results in a regressive or compensatory pattern of class sizes for a sample of national school systems. Sorting effects are identified by subtracting the causal effect of class size on performance...

We examine whether the sorting of differently achieving students into differently sized classes results in a regressive or compensatory pattern of class sizes for a sample of national school systems. Sorting effects are identified by subtracting the causal effect of class size on performance...

We examine whether the sorting of differently achieving students into differently sized classes results in a regressive or compensatory pattern of class sizes for a sample of national school systems. Sorting effects are identified by subtracting the causal effect of class size on performance...

The literature suggests that competition among schools might increase quality. However, not much empirical evidence is present as only a few countries allow competition at a large scale. One exception is the Netherlands. Free parental choice is the leading principle of the Dutch education system...

Does fiscal decentralization lead to more efficient governance, better public goods, and higher economic growth? This paper tests Riker''s theory (1964) that the results of fiscal decentralization depend on the level of countries'' political centralization. We analyze crosssection and panel data...

We present and illustrate novel data on more than a century of regulation in Switzerland. We provide quantitative measures for Swiss cantons on the annual stock of legally binding rules from 2006-2013 and on regulatory activity as reflected in the annual changes to such regulation from...

The need to be compliant with the fiscal frameworks of the European Union and Spain has generated asymmetric fiscal behavior across the Spanish government tiers regarding the distribution of the needed fiscal efforts to pursue public finance sustainability and macroeconomic stability in the...

We use U.S. county data (3,058 observations) and 41 conditioning variables to study growth and convergence. Using OLS and 3SLS-IV we report on the full sample and metro, non-metro, and 5 regional samples: (1) OLS yields convergence rates around 2 percent; 3SLS yields 6-8 percent; (2) convergence...