Suchergebnisse

We study a fiscal policy model in which the government is present-biased, leading to an excessive public deficit. An optimally designed fiscal rule needs to trade off the benefit of committing the government to not overspend against the benefit of granting it flexibility to react to shocks to tax revenues. Unlike prior work, we characterize a rule that is enforced through political incentives: the punishment for a violation of the rule consists in a reduction of the politician's payoff from being in office during the following period. We show that the optimal fiscal rule prescribes a zero structural deficit and only partially accounts for revenue shocks. Moreover - and somewhat surprising - a government with a stronger ex ante deficit bias should be granted a higher degree of flexibility. Flexibility leads to more rather than less fiscal discipline because the punishment for a rule violation is less driven by luck and more dependent on actual policy choices. Thus a trade-off between fiscal discipline and fiscal rule flexibility, as often claimed in the context of the EU's Stability and Growth Pact, does not typically exist in our model.

Although the European rules on water, which are mainly based on the Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000/60/EC), have been in force for many years, the quality of waters in Europe still have huge room for improvement before they can fulfil the objectives set by the WFD and by its "daughters Directive". Two questions are key here: Are the European rules adequate for this challenging goal? If yes, are the rules applied homogeneously and correctly in European Union Countries or do many issues remain which prevent their full implementation?
This article provides a broad overview of water issues in Europe, focusing on the level of fulfillment of requisites from EU legislation and the level of its implementation in Member States. This point of view has been adopted because an uneven implementation of EU laws prevents several European citizens from fulfillment of their right to a healthy environment and a good water resource quality and, furthermore, endangers the level playing field across Europe, from a social and economic point of view.

Over the past decades, the gender gap in housework has become smaller and scholars have called on changing structural conditions and on the diffusion of egalitarian gender roles to explain why. In particular, women's presence in the public sphere is found to be associated with a more egalitarian division of chores between partners. However, despite the large presence of women in the public sphere in many countries, the gender gap in housework has not disappeared. This article asks whether the widespread presence of men in the public sphere is slowing the diffusion of more egalitarian practices of housework division. Using multilevel models on European Social Survey data (2010), the article shows that in countries where men work long standard hours, women perform relatively more housework and men relatively less, highlighting the importance of men's aggregate behavior in explaining partners' relative time on housework.

Despite the importance of Cohesion Policy in reducing regional disparities and stimulating economic growth across member states, it has been exposed to compliance challenges. These challenges are evidenced by a higher number of errors and irregularities against other areas of the European Union's budgetary expenditure. Especially fraudulent irregularities may put the EU's financial interests at risk. The question arises, thus, how to protect this EU's largest investment area from fraudulent actions. This article addresses the following research question: How did Member States fight fraud in cohesion policy by taking preventive measures during the period 2014-2020? This contribution takes an exploratory, triangulated approach based on documentary analysis, analysis of a statistical dataset and interviews in the case of two countries, Italy and Slovakia. The findings will first show what measures Italy and Slovakia took to prevent fraud and, second, relate these measures to the countries' performance in the fight against fraud.

The EU Cohesion Policy was observed to be marked by financial compliance problems due to a relatively high level of irregularities. This problem brings into question the issue of how to prevent such infringements of the rules applicable to EU expenditure. Against this backdrop, this article investigates how Poland worked to prevent irregularities during the 2014–2020 programming period. Specifically, the focus is on whether prevention measures enhanced Poland's financial compliance performance. For this purpose, a novel model of 'non-compliance financial rate' (NCFR) is proposed and triangulated with qualitative findings from semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, which has shown encouraging results that might be relevant also for other Member States.

Despite the introduction of laws granting family rights for lesbians and gays (LG) in many countries, negative attitudes towards homosexuality persist among various segments of the population, even in countries that have fully legitimized same-sex relationships. This mismatch raises questions about the processes through which societies achieve positive attitudes towards gays and lesbians. This article applies diffusion theory to nearly 20 years of European Social Survey data for 27 countries to provide an in-depth examination of the evolution of attitudes towards gays and lesbians. Using data on same-sex legislation and cluster analysis, we construct a classification of countries distinguishing among those that are more versus less ahead in the process of granting family rights for LG couples, which is then applied to societal growth curve models to account for historical changes in attitudes among different social groups. Our results show a stronger increase in positive attitudes towards homosexuality among higher educated, secular, and non-conservative individuals in countries with greater same-sex rights. These findings suggest that laws granting family rights to LG people represent a necessary but not sufficient condition for the diffusion of positive attitudes towards homosexuality, pointing to a considerable lag between the macro and the micro-level.

The EU Cohesion Policy was observed to be marked by financial compliance problems due to a relatively high level of irregularities. This problem brings into question the issue of how to prevent such infringements of the rules applicable to EU expenditure. Against this backdrop, this article investigates how Poland worked to prevent irregularities during the 2014–2020 programming period. Specifically, the focus is on whether prevention measures enhanced Poland's financial compliance performance. For this purpose, a novel model of 'non-compliance financial rate' (NCFR) is proposed and triangulated with qualitative findings from semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, which has shown encouraging results that might be relevant also for other Member States.