This paper presents empirical evidence of a positive effect of council size on government spending using a data set of 2,056 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria over a period of 21 years. We apply a regression discontinuity design to avoid an endogeneity bias. In particular, we exploit...

This paper undertakes an empirical analysis of the adoption of various components of social security systems as well as contribution rates. Apart from economic determinants of the adoption, the empirical analysis features determinants relating to countries' political systems and contagion. We...

This paper implements a fair wage constraint into an analytically tractable core-periphery agglomeration model. This enables us to study the role of imperfect labour markets for the pattern of agglomeration. In the short run, a marginal increase in fair wage preferences leads to an unambiguous...

This paper investigates the effect of tax treaties on bilateral stocks of outward FDI. For this purpose we employ a numerically solvable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational firms to study the impact of tax treaties on both welfare and outward FDI. The model indicates under which...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic freedom and taxation. We argue that an economically free environment improves the attractiveness of a location, which, in turn, enables governments to levy higher business taxes. To test this hypothesis empirically, we estimate the impact...

Österreich und Deutschland sind nicht nur Nachbarländer sondern auch in der Geschichte Mitteleuropas historisch eng verbunden - so sehr, daß Österreicher und Deutsche neben der gemeinsamen Sprache auch wichtige Grundüberzeugungen politischer, sozialer und kultureller Art teilen. Trotzdem...