The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can raise their reputation purely with new or more...

This is one of the first studies to estimate a popularity function at the micro-level. Using German micro-level data (GGSS/ALLBUS) for the years 1991, 1992, 1998, and 2008, we show that a positive assessment of the economy significantly improves government popularity while negative evaluations...

Dieses Papier untersucht, ob die Festlegung der durchschnittlichen Steuerbelastung deutscher Spitzenverdiener zwischen 1958 und 2011 von der Zusammensetzung der Bundesregierung in Form von Verbindungen zur nationalen (akademischen) Elite und dem Unternehmensnetzwerk beeinflusst wird. Die...

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from...