Most contributions in the field of fiscal federalism explain a jurisdiction’s performance by the role of institutions and political or economic restrictions. A more recent literature, however, also points to the importance of policy makers and their personal impact on policy outcomes. Hence, this research program aimed at evaluating this impact by focusing on local elections in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Both, personal data on elected mayors as well as data on all candidates who ran for elections are collected. Based on this unique dataset our analysis was based on a two-step procedure. First, determinants of candidate (self-)selection and secondly the impact of personal characteristics of politicians on fiscal policy decisions were examined. Furthermore, our results provided evidence concerning the question whether commonly accepted insights from labour economics can be transferred to field of politics.Please find here the collected data of the Project, as well as the documentation and the codebook