Suggestions for economic policy reform are regularly confronted with the problem of lacking reform acceptance in the political process and among the general public. So far "Reformstau" is widely analysed as a consequence of collective action failures. In contrast to these approaches based on...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We consider two scenarios: a proportional income shock and a shock on employment which increases the rate of unemployment. We...

The volume of short-term liquidity credit ("Kassenkredit") of the German municipalities has increased rapidly in the last two decades. This development suggests that this debt instrument has been diverted from its original purpose, namely as an instrument of bridging short-run liquidity...