This paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both federalism and...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical 'Tullock Challenges'. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

This article introduces a novel database that measures governments’ compliance with national constitutions. It combines information on de jure constitutional rules with data on their de facto implementation. The individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we...

In this paper we examine the potential of democratic constitutions for the provision of divisible public goods in a large economy. Our main insights are as follows: When aggregate shocks are absent, the combination of the following rules yields first-best allocations: a supermajority rule, equal...

The paper examines the scope for mutually beneficial intergenerational cooperation, and looks at various attempts to theoretically explain the emergence of norms and institutions that facilitate this cooperation. After establishing a normative framework, we examine the properties of the...

This paper provides a unified treatment of externalities associated with fertility and human capital accumulation as they relate to pension systems. It considers as overlapping generations model in which every generation consists of high earners and low earners with the proportion of types being...

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites and to investigate the nature of the links between recruitment of elites and economic growth. The main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their...

We introduce distributive justice into a simple model of growth and distribution. Two groups (‘classes’) of otherwise identical, capital-rich and capital-poor individuals (‘capitalists’) and (‘workers’) are in conflict over factor (labour-capital) shares. Capitalists’ (workers’)...

We contribute to the literature on private financing of intergenerational public goods, focusing on climate change mitigation. We consider, in a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with environmental externalities, a contract between successive generations, whereby agents of...