We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from...

Die Bewältigung der COVID-19 Krise verursacht erhebliche fiskalische Kosten. Um diese Budgetdefizite zu schließen, werden mitunter auch in Deutschland einmalige Steuern auf größere Vermögen gefordert. Vergangene Erfahrungen mit einmaligen Vermögensabgaben beziehen sich oft auf...

We analyze the effect of electoral turnout on incumbency advantages by exploring mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria. Mayors are elected by majority rule in two‐round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the state...

This paper analyses the differential effect of trade agreements on income per capita of subnational regions with international borders. We construct an extensive panel dataset covering 1350 regions in 86 countries worldwide between 1950 and 2017. Our results show that trade agreements are...

When moving from a plurality rule to a proportional system, members of national parliament have more incentives to diverge from the median voter's preferences. We match voting behavior concerning legislative proposals of Swiss members of parliament with real referenda outcomes on the same issues...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. This so far neglected fact has important consequences for the tax vs. debt choice. Property owners suffer more from the debt burden and, thus, have a stronger preference for tax financing of government spending than tenants. As a consequence of the...

Mobility may undermine local income redistribution in federal systems,because rich taxpayers can evade high taxes by moving to low tax jurisdictions. By analyzing a model of local income redistribution with endogenous voting, income heterogeneity and an exogenously given degree of mobility we...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax financing. Our model of the resulting democratic fight...

Rational individuals know that present government debts transform into higher future taxes. The Ricardian equivalence implies that the burden of the debt is not shifted between generations because of compensating intergenerational transfers. While the assumptions for Ricardian equivalence to...