This paper investigates the behavior of rent-seeking politicians in an environment of increasing economic integration. The focus of the paper is on the implications of globalization-induced political yardstick competition for constitutional design with a view to the current discussion in the...

Using a representative survey of German university students, we confirm that proclaimed support for environment protection policies depends on socio-cultural factors and political ideology. Unlike most related studies for other countries, we find that the environmental policy stance of German...

We review the literature on the public choice approach to explaining redistribution policies. The focus is on policies that are pursued with the sole reason to redistribute initial endowments. Moreover, we restrict ourselves to redistribution in democracies. In democratic settings, generic...

Economic theory advances various arguments in favor of and against privatizing education. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these arguments influence voters opinions. We analyze two popular referenda in which some 400,000 voters in two Swiss cantons expressed their opinions on the...

Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a politicaleconomic...

We investigate whether the field of study influences university students' political attitudes. To disentangle self-selection from learning effects, we first investigate whether the fields of study chosen by the incoming students correlate with their political attitudes. In a second step we...

The traditional school of economic policy analysis predicts that globalisation will give rise to predatory competition between the governments of the European nation states. The consequence is anticipated to be a marked reduction in, if not the destruction of, the benevolent Welfare State. The...

We ask three questions. First, do election systems differ in how they translate physical attractiveness of candidates into electoral success? Second, do political parties strategically exploit the "beauty premium" when deciding on which candidates to nominate, and, third, do elected MPs use...

In this paper we present a model of endogenous trade-policy formation which captures crucial aspects of the Japanese commercial and political culture. We analyze the influence of the portrayed cultural traits and show that cultural idiosyncrasies are important determinants of trade policy...

The traditional criticism notwithstanding, we show that social mobility can, in principle, explain political income redistributions. Nonetheless, the social-mobility argument for redistribution is not satisfactory, as actual transition probabilities are not consistent with order-preserving...