From the perspective of redistributing income from rich to poor, equalizing intergovernmental grants are bound to have some perverse effects. For such grants, although transfering income from wealthy to poor on average, will inevitably result in some income transfers from poor individuals who...

This article presents a formal model of policy decision-making in an institutional framework of separation of powers in which the main actors are pivotal political parties with voting discipline. The basic model previously developed from pivotal politics theory for the analysis of the United...

From the perspective of redistributing income from rich to poor, equalizing intergovernmental grants are bound to have some perverse effects. For such grants, although transfering income from wealthy to poor on average, will inevitably result in some income transfers from poor individuals who...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

Many of the attributes that make a good "socially responsible" are credence attributes that cannot be learned by consumers either through search or experience. Consumers aggregate information about them from several channels (media, advertisement, NGOs, etc.). Since these sources may send...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...

In many areas of economics there is a growing interest in how expertise and preferences drive individual and group decision making under uncertainty. Increasingly, we wish to estimate such models to quantify which of these drive decision making. In this paper we propose a new channel through...

This paper analyzes the political economy of immigration when the salient electoral issue is the level of immigrants and the relevant immigration policy is the expenditure in immigration control. We consider that immigration affects voters’ welfare through economic and non economic factors. We...

This paper analyzes a two-alternative voting model with the distinctive feature that voters have preferences over margins of victory. We study voting contests with a finite as well as an infinite number of voters, and with and without mandatory voting. The main result of the paper is the...

We analyze the impact of different types of international conventions that require signatory countries to penalize domestic firms that are found to have bribed foreign public officials. We analyze enforcement of penalties under a convention styled after the OECD's 'Convention on Combating...