FG VWL, insbesondere Mikroökonomik
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Institute
Pursuing Happiness
(2012)
In this paper, we offer both a broad survey of the literature on fiscal federalism and long-run economic performance, and a detailed report of some of our own recent studies in this field. We look at the difference between study types (cross-country versus single-country studies), and at the relevance of the broader institutional framework into which fiscal decentralization is embedded. We also look into structural change and intergovernmental transfers as a detailed mechanism through which federalism may have an impact on aggregate economic performance.It turns out that fiscal decentralization has no robust effect on growth, but the evidence hints at a positive effect on overall productivity, conditional on the broader institutional framework.
A Tale of Two Federalisms: Long-Term Institutional Change in the United States and in Germany
(2011)
This paper offers a comparison of government centralization in the United States and in Germany. After briefly laying out the history of federalism in both countries, we identify the instruments of centralization at work. It is argued that an initial constitutional framework of competitive federalism does not prevent the long-term centralization of competencies. Against a background of historical evidence, we discuss the political economics of government centralization. It is argued that formal institutions clearly have an effect on the pathways of government centralization, but not necessarily on the broader trend of centralization. The conclusion is reached that preservation of state and local autonomy may eventually hinge on informal political institutions.
The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true preferences of candidates makes strategic delegation impossible. Instead, it is shown that the existence of rent extraction by delegates alone suffices to make cooperative centralisation more likely through representative democracy. In the non-cooperative case, the more extensive possibilities for institutional design under representative democracy increase the likelihood of centralisation. Direct democracy may thus be interpreted as a federalism-preserving institution.
This paper examines the interplay of horizontal and vertical reci- procity in determining the degree of tax compliance. Horizontal reciprocity is of the type that is frequently observed in public goods games, where reciprocally minded taxpayers may respond to non-contributing, strictly sel sh taxpayers by mimicking their sel sh behaviour. Vertical reciprocity is located in the relationship between the taxpayer and her government. Some recent empirical evidence is suggesting that initial cooperation of taxpayers with the scal authorities is not so much the result of positive reciprocity, but rather of a general tendency to obey authorities. Vertical reciprocity is therefore modeled as the propensity of taxpayers to retaliate against an uncooperative government by means of reducing the level of tax compliance. This allows us to identify feedback mechanisms between horizontal and vertical reciprocity.
The Legacy of Open Thought
(2009)
Rational Ignorance Is Not Bliss: When Do Lazy Voters Learn from Decentralised Political Experiments?
(2008)
A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. Often, an analogy between market competition as a discovery procedure and political competition is used to corroborate this argument. We argue that political learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a given stock of policy-related knowledge which was costly to accumulate, so that yardstick competition is improbable to function well particularly for complex issues, if representatives' actions are tightly controlled by the electorate. We show that factor mobility does have the potential to endogenously disturb equilibria on regional markets for political theories, and therefore does provide for improved political learning processes compared to unitary systems. But the results we can expect are far from the ideal mechanisms of producing and utilising knowledge often described in the literature. In particular, collective learning may occur in the relatively efficient region, while the status quo may be fortified in the relatively inefficient region.
Several authors have argued that a centralization of fiscal powers in a federation is less likely to occur if citizens have to approve a change in the assignments of responsibilities by a popular referendum. This outcome may be due to the fact that logrolling is more difficult under direct than under representative democracy. It may also be caused by citizens’ fear that a centralization of fiscal authority facilitates the extraction of rents by the government or the legislature. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that centralization is less likely under referendum decision-making in the unique institutional setting of Switzerland. Using a panel of Swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998, the empirical analysis provides evidence that referendums induce less centralization of fiscal activities.