In this chapter I provide an overview of the political economy of taxation in democratic states by considering the three most important issues in the field: (1) the evolution of the power to tax in (what are now) the mature constitutional democracies; (2) the nature and determinants of modern...

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics...

Most modern economies tax both consumption and labour income. While there is an extensive normative literature on the optimal mix of the two taxes, there is little examination of what determines the actual mix in a well specified political economy context. We use a multi-dimensional spatial...

We introduce a new dataset that includes quantitative harmonized indices of tax reforms based on qualitative information of about 900 Economic Surveys from the OECD and 37,000 tax-related news from the IBFD archives. The data set provides indicators on tax reforms for tax rates and tax bases,...

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics...

We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We...

We study an electoral competition model in which each voter is characterized by income level and non-economic characteristics, and where two vote share maximizing candidates, with fixed non-economic characteristics (differentiated candidates), strategically promise a level of redistribution. We...

In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they make their vote choice on the basis of (imprecise) subjective beliefs. I propose a new model of partisan competition to represent the interaction of these beliefs...