We examine the two-candidate equilibria of the citizen-candidate model when the implemented policy arises from a compromise between the government and an unelected external power. We show that the equilibria of this model differ significantly from the original: the distance between the...

This paper develops a dynamic framework to analyze the political sustainability of economic reforms in developing countries. First, we demonstrate that economic reforms that are proceeding successfully may run into a political impasse, with the reform’s initial success having a negative impact...

We examine moonlighting by politicians in Germany. In July 2007, the German Supreme Court adjudicated that members of parliament (MPs) have to publish details of their outside earnings. Using panel data models, we investigate how outside earnings are correlated with absence and parliamentary...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

For the first time we develop a time series of tax evasion (in % of official GDP) for 38 OECD countries over the period 1999 to 2010 based on MIMIC model estimations of the shadow economy. Considering indirect taxation and self-employment as the driving forces of tax evasion, we observe a...

This paper studies the impact of national fiscal rules on government size as measured by the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product. We develop a model of the budgetary process and show that a common pool problem may arise which can be mitigated through fiscal rules. We test...

This paper argues that high political competition does not necessarily induce policy makers to perform better as previous research has shown. We develop a political economy model and we show that when political competition is tight, and elected politicians can rely on more tax instruments, they...

We empirically investigate the existence of spatial autocorrelation between military dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 through 2007. We apply a Bayesian SAR probit regression, extended to a pooled model. We find a robust and positive spatial autocorrelation coefficient, which shows a...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...