The very essence of both federal and unitary countries is multi-tiered governments. This architecture typically involves some commonality of tax bases between higher- and lower-level authorities. This process points to the existence of vertical externalities, i.e. of an inefficiently high degree...

When democracy is new, it is often fragile and not fully consolidated. We investigate how the danger of a collapse of democracy may affect fiscal policy in new democracies in comparison to countries where democracy is older and often more established. We argue that the attitude of the citizenry...

Within the confines of linear tax and complete market, we show that the efficiency force for a negative capital tax may not be strong enough to reverse the politico-economic force for a positive redistributive taxation under temptation and self-control preferences.

We examine the effect of a federally-funded local infrastructure spending program on local unemployment rates. To address the likely funding endogeneity problem, we exploit variation in spending due to pork-barreling, and find that higher government expenditure on roads substantially reduces...

Political activism positively affects firm innovation. Firms that support more politicians, politicians on Congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms' industries and politicians who join those committees innovate more. We employ instrumental variables estimation and a...

Debating over efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms accounts for the routine business of democratic institutions. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) hold that anti-reform bias can be attributed to individual-specific uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses resulting...

This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous. Using official county-level voting data and a variety...

We propose a general equilibrium model where two special interest groups (SIGs) compete to influence public opinion. Citizens with heterogeneous priors over a binary state of the world receive reports drawn from a continuous message space by a variety of sources. The two opposite SIGs attempt to...