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Berit C. Gerritzen
Former Member
Title
Ph.D.
Last Name
Gerritzen
First name
Berit C.
Skype
beritgerritzen
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1 - 6 of 6
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PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Die VolkswirtschaftVolume: 84Issue: 4
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PublicationElectoral Budget Cycles and Strategic Use of Debt : An Empirical Investigation for Swiss MunicipalitiesFrom a public choice perspective, the impact of elections on politicians' behavior is of particular interest. Using a panel data set of the 20 largest Swiss cities from 1977 to 2007, this book analyzes whether opportunistic spending behavior around elections is less pronounced if citizens can directly influence fiscal decisions. More specifically, it is being tested whether the presence of mandatory fiscal referenda mitigates electoral budget cycles and the strategic use of debt. The econometric analysis suggests that there is only weak evidence for an electoral budget cycle or strategic use of debt as such. This result is not surprising, since coalition governments are a central feature of Swiss politics. Therefore, both benefits as well as losses related to a change in majority are limited - which reduces the incentive to engage in unsustainable policies for re-election motives. The results further indicate that local public debt is responsive to autocorrelation and business cycle effects. A reduced share of intergovernmental grants is associated with lower deficits. The coalition size and the share of leftist parties in the parliament do not significantly affect local debt.Type: book
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PublicationFederalism in Health and Social Care in Switzerland(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
;Costa-Font, JoanGreer, Scott L.Type: book section -
PublicationType: newspaper articleJournal: Die VolkswirtschaftIssue: 84
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PublicationFacts or Ideology: What Determines the Results of Econometric Estimates of the Deterrence Effect of Death Penalty? A Meta-AnalysisProvided that the literature on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is overall inconclusive, the fact that individual authors persistently claim to have found solid evidence in one or the other direction raises two questions. Firstly, what are the causes for these different results? Do different data samples, estimation methods or time periods lead to different results or do the outcomes merely reflect prior convictions of the authors? Secondly, to what extent is it possible to derive such diverging results by slightly changing the specification of the test equations without violating scientific standards? After a survey of the over forty reviews of this literature available so far, we perform a meta-analysis of 102 deterrence studies published between 1975 and 2011. The profession of the author turns out to be the only statistically significant explanatory variable: Economists claim significantly more often to have found a significant deterrence effect than embers of law or other social science departments. Furthermore, using a panel data set of U.S. states, we show how easy it is to derive contradictory results by employing alternative specifications. Thus, our results reinforce the claim that the empirical evidence presented to date is by far too fragile in order to base political decisions on it.Type: working paperIssue: No. 4159, March 2013
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PublicationType: working paper