This is a survey on the recent game theoretic literature on committee decision making. We consider theoretical work on the role of (i) strategic voting, (ii) costly information acquisition, (iii) conflicting interests, and (iv) communication in committees. Moreover, we review recent experimental...

Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

In this paper we assess to what extent in the existence of a financial crisis, government spending can contribute to mitigate economic downturns in the short run and whether such impact differs in crisis and non crisis times. We use panel analysis for a set of OECD and non-OECD countries for the...

Abstract The term Stabilitätskultur (culture of stability) has gained popularity in the recent debate on the future institutions for fiscal and monetary policy in Europe. Those who use it argue that - besides institutions - social norms and traditional behavior are crucial for a country's...

Zusammenfassung Die bisher getrennte empirische Literatur zu Zentralbankglaubwürdigkeit und Insider Macht auf Arbeitsmärkten wird kritisch im Licht eines einheitlichen Modells untersucht, das den Interessenkonflikt von Gewerkschaften und Zentralbank bei der Bestimmung von Beschäftigung und...