There is a growing literature on the effect of electoral competition and democratic participation on issues such as corruption and government policy. The theoretical and empirical literature suggests that electoral competition has a beneficial impact on policies. This paper studies the effects...

This paper studies the different economic configurations that may give rise to incomplete fiscal decentralization, with the vertical imbalance problem associated to it. Particularly, we look at an economy which has given up monetary policy and cannot monetize national or sub-national government...

This paper provides new evidence on the relevance of alternative theories of federal budget allocation to US States. Using a panel of 48 states over 20 years, we estimate the size and relative importance of different institutional and political factors in determining such allocation. We find...

En este estudio, se evalúa la importancia de las transferencias intergubernamentales sobre el esfuerzo fiscal realizado por los gobiernos locales, así como, el impacto que tienen sobre el nivel de actividad local en el Perú. Usando una base de datos de panel para los municipios distritales y...

According to globalization, certain kinds of public goods, which used to be working as the goods just in a national economy, are getting internationalized or released for foreigners as well. In addition, those goods often exhibit differentiated features for a certain degree. The goods as such...

Spatial models of voting behaviour are the dominant paradigm in political science. Consistent with this approach, it will be the case that, ceteris paribus, voters should vote for the party nearest to them on the political spectrum. A key question is how we measure nearness or distance. We...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide a political decision-maker with policy-relevant information and to exert pressure on her. Both activities are costly but may induce the lobby's preferred policy. Our paper provides an integrated analysis of both lobbying activities and...

The phenomenon of "choice shifts" in group decision-making is fairly ubiquitous in the social psychology literature. Faced with a choice between a ``safe" and ``risky" decision, group members appear to move to one extreme or the other, relative to the choices each member might have made on her...

Abstract: In a society where individuals differ in their valuation of different social policies, when might one consider a given individual as having references that are extreme relative to the others? And how important are such preferences in determining eventual policy? In this paper, we...

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the voting franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We specify a class of dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time. Each period, private...