Zareh Asatryan

Direct democracy and local public finances under cooperative federalism

This paper exploits the introduction of the right of referenda at the local level in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between referenda activity and fiscal performance by using a new dataset containing information on all 2500 voter initiatives between 1995 to 2011. This selection on observables approach, however, suffers from obvious endogeneity problems in this application. The main part of the paper exploits population dependent discontinuities in the signature and quorum requirements of referenda to implement a regression discontinuity design (RDD). To safeguard against co-treatments that might affect fiscal outcomes simultaneously at the same thresholds, we validate our results by extending the RDD approach to a difference-in-discontinuity (DiD) design. By studying direct legislation in an archetypical cooperative federation as Germany, our paper extends the literature to a novel institutional setting. The results indicate that in our setting – and in contrast to most of the evidence from Switzerland and the US – direct democracy causes an expansion of local government budgets.

The Effect of Direct Democracy on the Level and Structure of Local Taxes

We study the effect of direct democracy on local taxation. Our setting is the German federal state of Bavaria, where in 1995 a state-wide referendum introduced the possibility to initiate direct democratic legislation into the local government code. Relying on a sample of all Bavarian municipalities over the period 1980-2011, we hypothesize that complementing a representative form of government with direct democratic elements leads to (i) higher local tax rates and (ii) a shift of the local tax mix from taxes with broader (property taxes) to taxes with narrower bases (business taxes). For identification, we implement selection on observables and difference-in-discontinuity designs. Our results show that both actual direct democratic activity measured by the number of initiatives and the ease with which direct democratic legislation can be implemented measured by signature and quorum requirements increase local tax rates and shift the tax mix toward taxes with narrower bases.

Direct Democracy and Local Public Finances under Cooperative Federalism: Direct democracy and local public finances under cooperative federalism

This paper exploits the introduction of the right of referenda at the local level in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. In the first part of the paper, we establish the relationship between referenda activity and fiscal performance by using a new dataset containing information on all 2500 voter initiatives between 1995 to 2011. This selection on observables approach, however, suffers from obvious endogeneity problems in this application. The main part of the paper exploits population dependent discontinuities in the signature and quorum requirements of referenda to implement a regression discontinuity design (RDD). To safeguard against co-treatments that might affect fiscal outcomes simultaneously at the same thresholds, we validate our results by extending the RDD approach to a difference-in-discontinuity (DiD) design. By studying direct legislation in an archetypical cooperative federation as Germany, our paper extends the literature to a novel institutional setting. The results indicate that in our setting - and in contrast to most of the evidence from Switzerland and the US - direct democracy causes an expansion of local government budgets.

Reforming the public administration: The role of crisis and the power of bureaucracy

The need to balance austerity with growth policies has put government efficiency high on the economic policy agenda in Europe. Administrative reforms that boost the internal efficiency of bureaucracy can alleviate the trade-off between consolidation and public service provision. Against such a backdrop, this paper constructs (and makes available) a novel reform indicator to explore the determinants of public administration reforms for a panel of EU countries. The findings support political-economic reasoning: An economic and fiscal crisis is a potent catalyst for reforms, but a powerful bureaucracy constrains the opportunities of a crisis to promote reform. Furthermore, there is some suggestive evidence for horizontal learning from other EU countries, and for vertical learning associated with a particular type of EU cohesion spending.

Vote Buying or (Political) Business (Cycles) as Usual

We provide new evidence on the short-run effect of elections on monetary aggregates. We study month-to-month fluctuations in the growth rate of M1 in a sample of 85 low and middle income democracies from 1975 to 2009. The evidence shows an increase in the growth rate of M1 during election months of about one tenth of a standard deviation. A similar effect can neither be detected in established OECD democracies nor in the months leading up to the election. The effect is larger in democracies with many poor and uneducated voters, and in Sub-Saharan Africa and in East-Asia and the Pacific. We show that the election month monetary expansion is demand driven and can be best explained by systemic vote buying. Systemic vote buying requires significant amounts of cash to be disbursed right before elections. The finely timed increase in M1 that we observe in the data is consistent with this. The timing is inconsistent with a monetary cycle aimed at creating an election time boom and it cannot be, fully, accounted for by other possible explanations.

Responses of Firms to Tax, Administrative and Accounting Rules: Evidence from Armenia

Using panel data on the full population of corporate tax returns of Armenian firms, we study the behavioral response of firms to three size-dependent regulations. We find: i) a strong response to an accounting notch where International Financial Reporting Standards become mandatory; ii) a moderate response to an administrative notch below which the frequency of filing and paying taxes declines from monthly to quarterly; and iii) no response to a tax notch created by the registration threshold of the value added tax. Exploiting tax audits, we provide evidence suggesting that income under-reporting drives the bunching response of firms by between 60 and 100 percent. Additional evidence suggests that firms respond to tax audits by compensating every additional dollar of audit driven increase in reported income by a 0.7-0.8 dollar increase in reported deductions.

Remittances and public finances : evidence from oil-price shocks

We study the effect of inflowing remittances - a major source of capital for many countries - on tax-revenues and tax-policy. Instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil-price interacted with a countrys distance to oil-producing countries, we find that remittances have a large positive effect on VAT revenues but no effect on income-tax revenues. This suggests that remittances often escape the income tax but can be taxed via consumption. We further show that tax policy is responsive to shocks in incoming remittances: remittances make the adoption of VAT-systems more likely, and they lead to lower VAT-rates and higher income-tax rates.

Reforming the Public Administration. The Role of Crisis and the Power of Bureaucracy

The need to balance austerity with growth policies has put government efficiency high on the economic policy agenda in Europe. Administrative reforms which boost the efficiency of the administration can alleviate the trade-off between consolidation and public service provision. Against such backdrop, this study explores the determinants of efficiency enhancing public administration reforms for a panel of EU countries using a novel reform indicator. The findings support the political-economic reasoning: An economic and fiscal crisis is a potent catalyst for reforms, but a powerful bureaucracy effectively constrains the opportunities of a crisis to promote this particular type of reform. Furthermore, there is evidence for horizontal learning from other EU countries, and for vertical learning associated with a particular type of EU transfers.

Balanced Budget Rules and Fiscal Outcomes: Evidence from Historical Constitutions

This paper studies the long-run fiscal consequences of balanced budget rules (BBR) that are enshrined in a country’s constitution. Using historical data dating back to the 19th century and applying a difference-in-difference approach we find that the introduction of a constitutional-BBR reduces government debt-to-GDP and expenditure-to-GDP ratios, on average, by around 11 and 3 percentage points, respectively. We do not find evidence that BBRs also affect tax revenues. Our analysis demonstrates that such rules reduce the probability of experiencing a debt crisis, and that the effective enforcement of BBRs can be conditional on the quality of democratic institutions. In addition, we implement an instrumental variable approach by instrumenting the probability of having budget rules on de jure constraints on changing the constitution. This and other tests suggest that the relations we find are largely causal going from BBRs to fiscal outcomes.