This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal...

In a large-scale controlled trial in collaboration with the reelection campaign of an Italian incumbent mayor, we administered (randomized) messages about the candidate's valence or ideology. Informational treatments affected both actual votes in the precincts and individual vote declarations....

This paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat. The bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort, or if there is great uncertainty about whether...

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and forms of government on fiscal policy outcomes in a large sample of democracies. We rely on different estimation methods to address prospective problems of statistical inference, due to nonrandom selection of these constitutional rules. The...

This paper analyzes a model in which a group of rational individuals votes over the composition and time profile of public spending. All voters agree that a balanced budget is ex ante optimal. However, if there is disagreement between current and future majorities, a balanced budget is not a...

The importance of seigniorage relative to other sources of government revenue differs markedly across countries. This paper tries to explain this regularity by studying a political model of tax reform. The model implies that countries with a more unstable and polarized political system will have...