Two experiments show that eliciting taxpayer preferences on government spending—providing taxpayer agency--increases tax compliance. We first create an income and taxation environment in a laboratory setting to test for compliance with a lab tax. Allowing a treatment group to express...

This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors – education, health, personal social services, housing, and income maintenance and social security – are examined over three time...

Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector’s sheltered status on their unions’ wage strategies vis-à-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans, and...

This paper uses panel data from the 16 main states in India during the period 1967- 1999 to study the effects of having higher female representation in the State Legislatures on public goods, policy and expenditure. I find that women legislators make different decisions than men legislators....

At the centre of politics in Britain and other countries is what is sometimes called ‘the big trade-off’ – where to strike the balance between private consumption and collective goods and social spending – and hence the sacrifices that would be entailed by the higher taxation required to...

A growing literature documents the existence of strategic political reactions to public expenditure in one jurisdiction on either neighboring or reference jurisdictions. The latter might give raise to downward expenditure spiral, or “race to the bottom”. However, in ascertaining the...

Nonparametric regression is developed for data with both a temporal and a cross-sectional dimension. The model includes additive, unknown, individual-specific components and allows also for cross-sectional and temporal dependence and conditional heteroscedasticity. A simple nonparametric...

We use information from two prospective British birth cohort studies to explore the antecedents of adult malaise, an indicator of incipient depression. These studies include a wealth of information on childhood circumstances, behaviour, test scores and family background, measured several times...

This paper proposes an approach to proving nonparametric identification for distributions of bidders' values in asymmetric second-price auctions. I consider the case when bidders have independent private values and the only available data pertain to the winner's identity and the transaction...