There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

The recent theoretical literature on the determinants of trade agreements has stressed the importance of political gains, such as credibility, as a rationale for trade agreements. The empirical literature, however, has lagged behind in the estimation of the economic gains or losses associated...

Barack Obama’s victory in the 2009 presidential elections in the United States is widely credited to his personal charisma and his extraordinary rhetorical powers, as revealed throughout the campaign. President Obama was inaugurated in the midst of the worst economic crisis in the country,...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

We derive conditions of individual preferences and technology that give rise to a negative correlation between income inequality and environmental protection. We present a class of models (which captures a static model as well as an overlapping-generations model) in which individuals differ in...

We develop a general equilibrium analysis of the impact of active labour market policy on unemployment, wages and the welfare of the employed. This framework is used to assess the political support in favour of such policies and to relate it to the working of such policies and other parameters...

Even relatively poor people oppose high rates of redistribution because of the anticipation that they, or their children, may move up the income ladder. This ‘Prospect of Upward Mobility’ (POUM) hypothesis is commonly advanced to explain why democracies do not engage in large-scale...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is scarce, limited to few reforms and countries and for few years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital, public, and...

If the price effect of opening up a developing economy may be expected to act as a disincentive for investment in human capital, the opposite is likely to be true of the income effect, especially in the presence of credit market imperfections among the poor. It is shown in this Paper that this...

Endorsements are a simple language for communication between well-informed interest-group leaders and less-informed interest-group members. The members, who share some policy concerns, may not fully understand where their interests lie on certain issues. If their leaders cannot fully explain the...