We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each...

This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labor for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

This paper presents a review of the most significant fiscal rules policymakers can choose from. The insights from this review are then applied to the current budgetary situation of the European Union. In the European Union, the supranational Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) should provide the...

Proprietary rule, whereby the state is owned by a ruler who maximizes tax revenues minus the costs of governing, is a useful ideal type that describes many of the states that have ever existed. The study of proprietary rule and its public finance, however, is comparatively scarce. I argue that...

A growing theoretical literature on the effect of politicians' salaries on the average level of skills of political candidates yields ambiguous predictions. In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on the level of education of parliamentary candidates. We take advantage of an...

This paper studies the impact of campaign spending on votes in French legislative elections. We exploit the political financing reforms which were adopted in France in the mid-1990s. Under the new laws, spending limits were reduced, legal persons were no longer allowed to finance candidates, and...

This paper extends the small existing theoretical literature on negative campaigning, building on work by Harrington and Hess (1996). While their analysis explores the determinants of negative campaign spending using a classic spatial voting model, this paper relies instead on a probabilistic...

This paper studies how political competition can lead candidates to strategically increase the salience of specific issues, in order to influence voting decisions of marginal groups, with non trivial consequences for turnout rates. In my setup issues differ in their divisiveness, to be defined...

To help first- or second-year graduate students in economics apply their theoretical training, this paper shows how to solve a simple and intuitive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model using a calculator. Because this simplified Harberger model uses Cobb Douglas functional forms for...