Article about the problems of municipal governments related to fiscal consolidation in the Russian regions and the construction of the vertical of power during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin. The author analyzes the impact of the decline of the financial base of the city governments and...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it presents a very concise way of measuring fiscal stance. This procedure is based on the assumption that the ‘neutral change’ in the government budget can best be simulated with a long-term approximation of the underlying trend of total output....

The paper looks a China's institutional reforms in public finances against the background of European experiences. Particular attention is given to Switzerland and Germany where there is a high degree of consensus forming mechanisms. These federations are also characterized by concepts of...

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal insti- tutions. Combining data on the geographic...

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal...

The present paper is motivated by the interest of a more thorough analysis of the determinants of remittances for developing countries. Thus, a simple formal remittance behaviour model is provided in which the amounts of the sums transferred are negatively related to the migrants’ individual...

In this paper, we consider a model that suggests that the theory of exchange with asymmetric information seems suitable to provide a possible explanation model of occurrence and duration of civil wars. We show that although civil conflicts are not Pareto optimal ex post they may be Pareto...