In an empirical investigation, the paper identifies the main political economy drivers of structural policy changes in OECD countries' labour and product markets over the 1985-2003 and 1973-2003 periods respectively. Some of the drivers are beyond the control of governments (i.e., that are...

In theory, free and fair elections can improve the selection of politicians and incentivize them to exert effort. In practice, incumbency advantage and coordination issues may lead to the (re)election of bad politicians. We ask whether these two forces compound each other. Using a regression...