The prior paper in this sequel, Pope (2009) introduced the concept of a nominalist heuristic, defined as a focus on prominent numbers, indices or ratios. In this paper the concept is used to show three things in how scientists and practitioners analyse and evaluate to decide (conclude). First,...

This paper studies budget processes, both theoretically and experimentally. We give a sufficient condition for top-down and bottom-up budget processes to have the same voting equilibrium. Furthermore, at a voting equilibrium, it is not always true, as often presumed, that a top-down budget...

Mit dem Beginn der dritten Stufe der Europäischen Wirtschafts- und Währungsunion haben sich die Bedingungen für die Wirtschaftspolitik in den Teilnehmerstaaten grundlegend verändert. Die EWU schafft ein neues Umfeld für die Wirtschaftspolitik, indem sie Interdependenzen der nationalen...

We provide empirical estimates of the risk-sharing and redistributive properties of the German federal fiscal system based on data from 1970 until 2006, with special attention to the effects of German unification. We find that tax revenue sharing between the states and the federal government and...

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss the coordination of fiscal and monetary policies in EMU. In section 2, we develop a framework for studying monetary and fiscal policy in a monetary union to explore the implications of the common currency for policy coordination. We show that...

We discuss two essential problems of the political economy of public finances: The principal agent problem between voters and elected politicians and the common pool problem arising from the fact that money drawn from a general tax fund is used to pay for policies targeting more or less narrow...

Fiscal rules specify quantitative targets for key budgetary aggregates. In this paper, we review the experience with such rules in Japan and in the EU. Comparing the performance of fiscal policy in the 1980s and 1990s until 2003, we find that the fiscal rule of the 1980s exerted some but not...