We present the first evidence on public attitudes towards two prominent euro area reform proposals (European Unemployment Benefit Scheme and Sovereign Insolvency Procedure) and assess potential impediments to their implementation by means of a randomized survey experiment in Germany. We find...

Public disclosure laws on politicians' outside income aim to enhance electoral accountability, but their effects remain unclear and may backfire. Using a German disclosure reform, administrative tax data, and a difference-in-difference design, we show that MPs increased their outside income...

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that in a...

Mobility of high-income individuals across borders puts pressure on governments to lower taxes. A central tenet of the corresponding textbook argument is that mobile individuals react to tax differentials through migration, and in turn immobile individuals vote for lower taxes. We investigate to...

As part of Germany’s fiscal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, parents received three payments totalling e450 per child. Randomization in the payment dates and daily scanner data allow us to identify the effects of these transfers on household spending. We find a significant but small spending...

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases income tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that...

We analyze the effectiveness of fiscal policy in general and automatic stabilizers in particular to stabilize output in Eurozone member states under the current institutional framework of fiscal governance. First, a descriptive analysis based on macro data is conducted for the period 2007-2014,...