Democratic countries with substantial inequality and where people believe that success depends on connections and luck induce political support for high tax rates and generous welfare states. Traditional wisdom is that such policies harm the economy, but there is not much evidence that countries...

We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size and in their capacities for innovation. We associate the strength of IPR protection with the...

In economies with competitive labour markets social policies harm employment and output. In Europe, in particular, non-competitive labour markets with trade unions, efficiency wages and/or costly search and mismatch seem more realistic. Social policies such as progressive taxation or...