TY  - GEN
A1  - Gehring, Kai 
A1  - Schneider, Stephan A. 
Y1  - 2015/06//
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/18937/
EP  - 38
CY  - Heidelberg
TI  - Towards the Greater Good? EU Commissioners? Nationality and Budget Allocation in the European Union
T3  - Discussion Paper Series, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics
N2  - We analyse whether there is a relationship between EU Commissioners? national origin and political outcomes. For this purpose, we argue that examining the Commissioner for Agriculture allows the most precise empirical identi?cation: there is a speci?c budget for agriculture which accounts for the largest share of the overall EU budget and gives signi?cant leeway to the Commissioner. On average, providing the Commissioners is associated with increases in the share of the overall EU budget that is allocated to their country of origin of about one percentage point. This increase corresponds to half a billion Euro per year, a signi?cant change in particular for smaller member states. Alternative explanations are considered using country-speci?c time trends, examining pre- and post-treatment trends and modeling endogenous treatment-selection. There are no signi?cant differences in trend behavior between treated and non-treated countries both before and after providing the Commissioner. We demonstrate that our results are not driven by individual countries and show that selection-on-unobservables would have to be implausibly high to account for the estimated coefficient.
AV  - public
ID  - heidok18937
KW  - Fiscal Federalism
KW  -  Political Economy
KW  -  Budget Allocation
KW  -  European Union
KW  -  EU Commission
KW  -  EU Commissioners
KW  -  National Origin
ER  -