This article examines what may be taken into account, when designing a mechanism of international public finance to support south-north cooperation on domestic climate policies in developing countries. We draw lessons from existing mechanisms of conditional transfers. Experience with...

We here expand the static tax competition models in symmetric small regions, which were indicated by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) and Wilson (1986), to a dynamic tax competition model in large regions, taking consideration of the regional asymmetry of productivity of public capital and the...

How many international agreements should there be, and who should sign them? When policy issues are separable, linking them in a ‘grand international agreement’ facilitates policy cooperation by reallocating slack enforcement power. When policy issues are substitutes, issue linkage further...

The European Renewables Directive requires Member States to deliver on average 20% of their final energy consumption by 2020 using renewable energy sources. To deliver this target, Member States have to adjust planning procedures, evaluate energy market design, provide grid and supply...

Starting from the perspective of heterodox Keynesian-Minskyian-Kindlebergian financial economics, this paper begins by highlighting a number of mechanisms that contributed to the current financial crisis. These include excess liquidity, income polarisation, conflicts between financial and...

Conditional on choosing a pegged exchange rate regime, what determines the currency to which countries peg or “anchor” their exchange rate? This paper aims to answer this question using a panel multinomial logit framework, covering more than 100 countries for the period 1980-1998. We find...

This paper argues that uncertain or random voter turnout plays a key role in mediating conflicts of interest between voters and politicians on the one hand and heterogenous groups of voters on the other. Random voter turnout creates an incentive for politicians to seek con- sensus because it is...

Coups d'etat continue to be common around the world, often leading to changes in leaders and institutions. We examine the relationship between military spending and coups and find that (i) successful coups increase military spending by more than failed attempts, and (ii) coups are more likely...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

This paper studies the relationship between corruption and sustainable development in a sample of 110 countries between 1996 and 2007. Sustainability is measured by growth in genuine wealth per capita. The empirical analysis consistently finds that cross-national measures of perceived and...