I introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office-seeking politicians, a continuum of voters, and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies. Lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework. Politicians use contributions to finance their electoral...

We present an overlapping generations model with two families who can guarantee old age support either by intra-family transfers from child to parent or via a tax-financed public pension system encompassing both families.We derive the individually and family-specific optimal decisions and...

Are business associations - private, formal, nonprofit organizations designed to promote the common interests of their members - positive or negative for the economy and overall welfare? Scholars from institutional and organizational economics, on the one side, and from industrial organization,...

Why do Scandinavian countries perform better in terms of environmental protection than other European Union countries? In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that societies characterised by low income inequality (such as the nordic European countries) generate political-economic equilibria...

Abstract: When it comes to economic reforms in developing countries, many economists agree on broad objectives (such as fostering outward orientation). Broad objectives, however, can be pursued in many di¤erent ways, and policy experimentation is often indispensable for learning which...

This paper studies the consequences of asymmetric litigation costs. Under three differ- ent protocols: static legal process, dynamic legal process with exogenous sequencing and dynamic legal process with endogenous sequencing, solutions are obtained for the litigation efforts and the expected...