Common wisdom dictates that fiscal governance (i.e. procedural fiscal rules) improves fiscal discipline. We rather find that selected fiscal constraints protect the coalitional status quo from logrolling. In effect, fiscal governance may deteriorate fiscal position. In political economy with...

We extend a model of wasteful state aid in Dewatripont and Seabright (2006, Journal of the European Economic Association 4, 513--522) by a supranational controlling authority. The model combines moral hazard and adverse selection to show that politicians fund wasteful projects to signal their...

We survey the state-of-the-art methods of how to rank economic departments on the basis of a sample of 14 studies conducted in years 1995-2005. We cover a diversity of rankings: U.S., worldwide, E.U., those of developed academic nations and those of developing academic nations. Each method rests...

This paper discusses the methodology of quantitative measures of research output. The authors illustrate various approaches to the contentious issue of to how to treat co-authored papers, how to best affiliate migrating authors, and how to quantify the quality of economic periodicals. The...

If local public goods exhibit spillovers and regions are sufficiently symmetric, decentralization implies underprovision, whereas cooperative centralization is associated with strict Pareto-improvement. This classic inference rests on two assumptions: local politicians are delegated sincerely...

When nominal wage rigidity is large, and banking sector oligopolistic, the benevolent government may prefer to regulate interest rates to boost labor demand. A government of a transition economy may postpone bank privatization to keep credit provision under control, as long as inefficiencies of...

A government applying for a club membership may strategically delay entry to cope with the hold-up problem introduced by anticipatory investments of the private sector. In equilibrium of a two-period incomplete information game, we find that a pro-entry government may strategically delay to...

When local public goods are provided by a centralized authority, spillovers may be coordinated, but heterogeneity in preferences may be suppressed. Besley and Coate (2003) have already solved this classic trade-off for a uniform tax regime. Here, we extend their approach by allowing for a...