The need to balance austerity with growth policies has put government efficiency high on the economic policy agenda in Europe. Administrative reforms which boost the efficiency of the administration can alleviate the trade-off between consolidation and public service provision. Against such...

Over the past five years, the euro area's fiscal rules have been reformed and extended. It is not clear, however, whether these changes have been effective at boosting fiscal prudence, and whether they go far enough. This policy paper summarises recent research findings from a...

We study the short-run effect of elections on monetary aggregates in a sample of 85 low and middle income democracies (1975-2009). We find an increase in the growth rate of M1 during election months of about one tenth of a standard deviation. A similar effect can neither be detected in...

Fears of job losses and of increasing inequality loom large in current debates on how globalization is affecting our economies. By fundamentally changing the organization of production and work, globalization creates complex and changing patterns of winners and losers. Globalization thus creates...

We study the effect of direct democracy on local taxation. Our setting is the German federal state of Bavaria, where in 1995 a state-wide referendum introduced the possibility to initiate direct democratic legislation into the local government code. Relying on a sample of all Bavarian...

[This document was requested by the European Parliament's Committee on Budgetary Control. It designated Mr Brian Hayes (MEP) to follow the study.] - The recent European crisis has put the issue of government efficiency high on national policy agendas. Policy measures that result in a reduction...

Following numerous reforms of fiscal governance in the eurozone since 2011, the year 2016 saw another important innovation: the founding of the European Fiscal Board (EFB) with the selection and appointment of its five members. The EFB was one of the elements envisaged by the Five Presidents'...

The "true" size of fiscal multipliers is widely debated by economists and policy makers as large (small) multipliers provide arguments to expand (cut) public spending. Within a meta-analytical framework, we ask whether the large observed variance in multiplier estimates can be explained by the...

By international comparison as well as compared to other EU policies, the EU's Cohesion Policy (CP) evaluation system is far developed and institutionalized. This paper analyses the remaining gaps and shortcomings in the CP evaluation system against principles established by the OECD and others...

The EU's Cohesion Policy (CP) intends to promote European economic, social, and territorial cohesion. The policy occupies about a third of the EU budget and it is the most evaluated of all EU policies. With the support of the German Ministry of Finance, two in-depth ZEW research papers by...