Performance budgeting schemes in the public sector have to operate with imperfect performance measures. We argue that these imperfections generate incentives for the potential recipients of performance-based funds to use up resources in socially wasteful influence activities. We develop a...

Does budget transparency effectively limit the use of creative accounting to circumvent fiscal rules? Through examining a Spanish reform that limited the obligation to provide regular budget information, I study the effect of relaxing transparency rules on budget forecast errors. After the...

This paper empirically analyses the relationship between political leaders' socioeconomic backgrounds and public budget deficits utilising panel data on 21 OECD countries from 1980 to 2008. Building on sociological, as well as economic, research, we argue that the socioeconomic status of...

Do gender differences matter for politicians' budgetary behaviour when confronted with an exogenous change in the institutional framework? After the 2013 Spanish municipal reform, municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants were no longer responsible for managing the provision of social...

In this paper, we utilise data from a German population survey to test the validity of the Ricardian equivalence theorem (RET). In 2013, 2,000 representatively chosen people were asked whether they have altered their consumption and saving behaviour in response to the significant increase in...

A robust relationship between subjective well-being and mortality has been established in the literature. While this relationship has been confirmed for many measures and data sets, few studies address how it is affected by concrete diseases. In this paper we assess for the British Household...

An increasing number of municipalities cooperates in the field of economic development. In this paper, we focus on a specific instrument in this field, namely the development of joint business parks. We apply a hazard model to data from West-German municipalities between 2000 and 2015. We find...

We analyze whether, and if so by how much, stable funding would have contributed to the financial soundness of German banks in the time period between 1995 and 2013, before the Basel III liquidity regulation to address excessive maturity mismatches in the wake of the financial crisis via the Net...