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Observed fiscal policy varies greatly across time and countries. How can we explain this variation? This paper surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question. We adopt a unified approach in portraying public policy as the equilibrium outcome of an explicitly specified...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005067583
There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009209830
The recent theoretical literature on the determinants of trade agreements has stressed the importance of political gains, such as credibility, as a rationale for trade agreements. The empirical literature, however, has lagged behind in the estimation of the economic gains or losses associated...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009320405
Barack Obama’s victory in the 2009 presidential elections in the United States is widely credited to his personal charisma and his extraordinary rhetorical powers, as revealed throughout the campaign. President Obama was inaugurated in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009399716
This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009364997
Abstract This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the Cold War. We establish two relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government cause the State Department to under-report human rights violations of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008468546
Politicians frequently undertake projects whose budgetary costs are disproportionate to the benefits they create for the voters or shareholders those decision-makers represent. When they are not the result of simple random mistakes, such wasteful projects are often attributed to weak mechanisms...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008468681
This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last four decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008530343
Local merchant guilds were ubiquitous in medieval Europe, and their development was inextricably linked with the development of towns and the rise of the merchant class. We develop a theory of the emergence of local merchant guilds as an efficient mechanism to implement collusion among merchants...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10004976786
The paper reviews and evaluates in a non-technical manner the economic and political arguments for and against the two fiscal convergence criteria written into the Treaty of Maastricht and its Protocols. In order to qualify for full membership in Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), net general...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005123517