In the first part of the paper we present and discuss the new legislation, on both local taxes and the Internal Stability Pact, enacted in Italy between September 2006 and December 2007. The most important aspects concern: the “thawing” of the income surtax levied by local government; the...

The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the main effects on the incomes of Italian households of the fiscal consolidation measures that the government has introduced after the start of the great recession in 2008, with the objective of reducing the deficit of the public budget. The questions...

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by...

We offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico-economic model where men are richer than women, women display a higher preference for public goods, and women’s disenfranchisement carries a societal cost. We first derive the tax rate chosen by the male...

Bequest tax revenues have been constantly declining in all OECD countries for at least seventy years. We propose an explanation which is based on a dynamic politico-economic model where the evolution of bequest taxation is determined by wealth inequality. Since economic development induces a...

In this paper we study the evolution of citizenship laws around the world. Our analysis is based on a dataset we compiled to document such evolution in 162 countries in the 1948-2001 period. Our econometric results can be summarized as follows. The legal tradition, as represented by the...

This paper proposes a simple political economic model of public opinion support for the EU, drawing on the recent economic literature on integration processes. The basic element is the existence of a trade-off between the benefits of centralisation and the costs of harmonising policies in the...

The EU has recently launched the European Neighbourhood Policy, aimed at fostering integration with countries located close to its borders. This article proposes a liberal intergovernmentalist framework for the analysis of Ukraine's prospects of integration with the EU and apply it to evaluate...

We investigate the evolution of the legal institution of citizenship from a political economy perspective. We first present a median voter model of citizenship laws determination. Next we test the implications of the model on a new data set on citizenship laws across countries of the world. We...