Coalition governments, cabinet size, and the common pool problem: Evidence from the German states

Thushyanthan Baskaran

No 165, University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics

Abstract: The theoretical literature on common pool problems in fiscal policy suggests that government fragmentation increases public expenditures. In parliamentary regimes, the fragmentation hypothesis refers to (i) coalition governments and (ii) cabinet size. This paper explores the effect of coalition governments and cabinet size on public expenditures with panel data covering all 16 German States over the period 1975-2010. Identification is facilitated by the large within-variation in the incidence of coalition governments and the size of the cabinet in the German States. In addition, I exploit a feature of state electoral laws to construct a credible instrument for the likelihood of coalition governments.

Keywords: government fragmentation; common pool problems; coalition government; cabinet size; public expenditures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 H61 H72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/77915/1/752205250.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Coalition governments, cabinet size, and the common pool problem: Evidence from the German states (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cegedp:165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Göttingen Working Papers in Economics from University of Goettingen, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().