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    <title>EconStor Community: University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW)</title>
    <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/49978</link>
    <description>University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW)</description>
    <pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:42:12 GMT</pubDate>
    <dc:date>2026-04-30T02:42:12Z</dc:date>
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      <title>Do fiscal rules reduce public investment? Evidence from European regions</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/273554</link>
      <description>Title: Do fiscal rules reduce public investment? Evidence from European regions
Authors: Mühlenweg, Leonard; Gerling, Lena
Abstract: This paper analyses the impact of fiscal rules on different public spending categories, namely public expenditure and investment, at the subnational level in Europe. Building on the notion of the deficit bias, we suspect that in the presence of fiscal rules, politicians have an incentive to reduce public spending through disproportionate cuts in investments. To empirically test this hypothesis, we focus on subnational administrative levels since budget reallocations can be expected to be pronounced at these levels and because the empirical evidence here is scarce. We introduce a new index based on partially ordered set theory (POSET), using the EC's fiscal rules dataset, which allows us to analyze the stringency of fiscal rules for different levels of government. Our balanced dataset covers 179 NUTS2 regions in 14 EU member states from 1995 to 2018. The empirical analysis is based on Within, GMM, and instrumental variable estimators. Our empirical findings are highly robust. In our baseline model, a one standard-deviation increase in our fiscal rules stringency index reduces overall public expenditure by up to 1.28 percent, while investment declines by more than 4 percent. The results imply that more stringent fiscal rules lead to a disproportionate reduction in public investment as compared to overall expenditure.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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      <dc:date>2023-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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    <item>
      <title>Drivers of economic growth: The special case of Sub-Saharan Africa</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/266695</link>
      <description>Title: Drivers of economic growth: The special case of Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Helfer, Helena
Abstract: While global studies on drivers of economic growth are useful to derive global tendencies, a more insightful analysis that leads to explicit policy implications is possible when investigating smaller entities. In this study, we focus on a panel of 40 African countries located in the Sub-Saharan region. The panel covers the times period from 1995 to 2016. We combine data on institutions with data on economic growth in order to determine which institutions are especially conductive to growth. Our analysis is framed by the approach of a hierarchy of institutions in which political institutions provide a framework in which contemporary political, economic and societal institutions develop and foster economic growht. This framework provides a solid foundation for empirical analysis and allows for multi-facetted interpretation. We find that political institutions, and among them political rights and civil liberties, are the most conductive to economic growth in the region.</description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/266695</guid>
      <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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    <item>
      <title>A chance to win or lose it all? A systematic literature review on the consequences of natural disasters for governments</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/259002</link>
      <description>Title: A chance to win or lose it all? A systematic literature review on the consequences of natural disasters for governments
Authors: Kindsmüller, Anna
Abstract: Natural disasters, which usually abruptly cause severe harm and cost lives, have been shown to affect governmental popularity by sometimes leading to additional governmental popularity and sometimes to a loss of popularity. By considering the various theoretical propositions and empirical findings about this nexus together in a systematic review, here we pinpoint which factors determine whether a government gains or loses popularity after a natural disaster. The review shows that a government's operational and symbolic reactions increase the governmental popularity after a natural disaster but suggest that symbolic actions do so more strongly. On the contrary, in a society with significant political knowledge, a government has fewer opportunities to increase their popularity when using only symbolic means or cheap talk.</description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/259002</guid>
      <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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      <title>Institutional hierarchies and economic growth: A bundled approach</title>
      <link>https://hdl.handle.net/10419/266694</link>
      <description>Title: Institutional hierarchies and economic growth: A bundled approach
Authors: Helfer, Helena
Abstract: Theoretical and empirical evidence on the relationship between institutions and economic prosperity remains ambiguous, even though it has been part of scholarly discourse for decades. The present study adds to this discussion by introducing a bundled approach for measuring institutions. This approach takes into account interrelations in form of hierarchies between political, economic and the societal institutions and thereby adds to the literature that deals with the mechanisms of economic growth from an institutional perspective. Based on a panel of 153 countries from 1995 to 2016, we find that political institutions establish a deeprooted framework in which societal institutions, such as education and health care, act as main drivers of growth processes.</description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid isPermaLink="false">https://hdl.handle.net/10419/266694</guid>
      <dc:date>2022-01-01T00:00:00Z</dc:date>
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