Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who rose from low to high positions within...

One of the most cherished propositions in economics is that market competition by and large raises consumer welfare. But whether political competition has similarly virtuous consequences is far less discussed. This paper formulates a model to explain why political competition may enhance...

China’s economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China’s institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve "China puzzle" this paper analyses China’s institution - a regionally...

The paper discusses economic theories of harm for anti-competitive margin squeeze by unregulated and regulated vertically integrated firms. We review both predation and foreclosure theories, as well as the mere exploitation of upstream market power. We show that foreclosure provides an...

The explosion of globalization has increased firms incentives to exploit international tax differentials to their benefit. In this paper we consider a simple world with two countries with different market sizes and two multinationals with a division in each country. Both countries use a...

This paper examines whether, given the increasing salience of subnational governments, political decentralisation has an impact on overall economic performance. It uses panel data analyses in order to determine the association between a number of the different indices of political...

This Paper examines city formation in a country whose urban population is growing steadily over time, with new cities required to accommodate this growth. In contrast to most of the literature there is immobility of housing and urban infrastructure, and investment in these assets is taken on the...

The Paper builds a simplified model describing the economy of a currency union with decentralized national fiscal policy, where the main features characterizing the policy-making are similar to those in EMU. National governments choose the size of deficit taking into account the two main rules...

This paper integrates the distributive politics literature with the literature on decentralization by incorporating inter-regional project externalities into a standard model of distributive policy. A key finding is that the degree of uniformity (or 'universalism') of the provision of regional...

Does fiscal decentralization result in more efficient governance and higher economic growth? This Paper empirically tests the hypothesis posed by theoretical literature that the effect of economic decentralization depends on features of the political institutions. Using data from 95 countries...