With efforts across the industrial countries to increase the amount of foreign aid mounting, it is important to understand its determinants. This paper examines the factors affecting the support for foreign aid among voters in donor countries. A simple theoretical model, which considers an...

In the past several decades, many countries, among them non-democratic, chose to decentralize their governments. Building on insights provided by the “second generation” wave of research on fiscal federalism, this paper proposes a unified model to account for this. The idea is that...

Reduced inequality in human capital may reduce appropriationfrom the rich. They may therefore favor policies such as incometransfers and mandatory schooling which equalize human capital.Comparing several such policies, we find that mandatory schooling leads to higher incomes for both the rich...

This paper offers an explanation for the widespread phenomenon of uniform public schooling, which is viewed here as a way for the government to precommit itself to restraints on future income redistribution. Such precommitment is likely to enhance accumulation of human capital, to bolster...

The relationship between the distribution of political rights and that of economic resources has been studied both theoretically and empirically. This paper reviews the existing literature and, in particular, the available empirical evidence.Our reading of the literature suggests that formal...

While standard political economy theories suggest a moderating effect of democratization on income inequality, empirical literature has failed to uncover any such robust relationship. Here we take yet another look at this issue arguing first, that prevailing ideology may be an important...

This paper studies a constitutional framework that enables sustainable federative agreements. In the model, districts decide on local policies and envision the possibility of entering a federation. Focusing on rules for legislative bargaining in the federation, I find that a non-egalitarian...