We examine the determinants of the EU budget expenditures allocation among different countries. Following previous literature, we consider two alternative explanations for the EU budget distribution: political power vs. 'needs view'. Taking the original data set (1976-2001) from Kauppi and...

Society’s demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the “psychology and economics” of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend,...

We investigate the dynamics of political systems in a framework where transitions are driven by reforms and revolts, and where political systems are a priori unconstrained, ranging continuously from single-man dictatorships to full-scale democracies. The dynamics are governed by the likelihood...

Individuals, differing in productivity and life expectancy, vote over the size and type of a collective annuity. Its type is represented by the fraction of the contributive (Bismarckian) component (based on the workers past earnings) as opposed to the non- contributive (Beveridgean) part (based...

Nous exploitons dans cet article la théeorie des indices de pouvoir pour éevaluer les infuences respectives des deux classes d’électeurs dans le mode de scrutin instauré par la loi électorale du 29 juin 1820, dite loi du \double vote". Nous montrons, à l’aide d’un modèle simplifié,...

We show that a transfer targeting a minority of the population is sustained by majority voting, however small the minority targeted, when the probability to receive the transfer is decreasing and concave in income. We apply our framework to the French social housing program and obtain that...

We analyze and evaluate the di¤erent decision rules describing the Council of Ministers of the EU starting from 1958 up to now. Most of the existing studies use the Banzhaf index (for binary voting) or the Shapley-Shubik index (for distributive politics). We argue in favor of the nucleolus as a...

We look at the consequences of allowing public health insurance (PuHI) to be voluntary when its coverage can be supplemented in the market. PuHI redistributes with respect to risk and income, and the market is affected by adverse selection. We argue that making PuHI voluntary does not lead to...

A model of entrepreneurial choices in an economy with a corrupt public procurement sector is built, providing predictions along two main dimensions. First, corruption is more frequent in sectors where public institutions are large buyers. Second, firms favoured with corrupt contracts enjoy extra...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the probability of casting a decisive vote for a class or random electorate models encompassing the celebrated IC and IAC models. The emphasis is on the impact of correlation across votes on the order of magnitude of this event. Our proof techniques...