This volume includes five self-contained chapters in the fields of public debt and fiscal transfer schemes. After an introduction to the topic, chapter 2 shows that the institutional setting of fiscal policy making needs to be considered when assessing the sustainability of fiscal policy. Using...

Whereas Senegal has long been sold as a showcase of democracy in Africa, including peaceful political alternance, things apparently changed fundamentally with the Senegalese presidentials of 2019 that brought new configurations. One of the major issues was political side-switching that has been...

In many European countries established leftwing and rightwing parties have been threatened by policy convergence and, in turn, new populist parties that offer more polarized platforms. I investigate whether government ideology influences dragnet-controls – controls of persons conducted by the...

We examine whether changes of government influence compliance with international agreements. We investigate compliance with the NATO two percent target to which all NATO countries committed themselves during the NATO summit in Wales in 2014. The dataset includes the military expenditure by NATO...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study ‘Potterian economics’, the economic ideas, insights...

In this comment, I revisit a question raised in Karadja and Prawitz (2019) concerning a causal relationship between mass emigration and long-run political outcomes. I find that their results are not robust to (i) selection of the appropriate control variables, (ii) using valid cluster-robust...

Etwa jede vierte Person in Deutschland hat eine Einwanderungsgeschichte. Ein Indikator für ihre Inklusion in das politische Leben ist, ob sie sich mit einer Partei verbunden fühlen. Befragungen des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) zeigen, dass Eingewanderte und ihre Kinder dies seltener tun...

This paper analyses financial inclusion in Africa focusing on the role of political business cycles and pricing behaviour of banks. We employ a sample of 330 banks operating in 29 African countries to test for two related hypotheses. Panel fixed and random effects were estimated for the period...

Die 16-jährige Kanzlerinnenschaft Angela Merkels, in der erstmalig eine Frau eine Bundesregierung führte, wurde vielfach als Meilenstein für Frauen in der Politik gewürdigt. Dies hat sich jedoch nicht in der parlamentarischen Repräsentation von Frauen niedergeschlagen. Der Frauenanteil im...