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...

Immigration control-related audits and their resulting sanctions are not solely determined by impartial enforcement of laws and regulations. They are also determined by the incentives faced by vote-maximizing congressmen, agents acting on their behalf, and workers likely to compete with...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

We propose a theory of tax centralization and inter governmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. This renders the degree of tax...

This paper studies the joint effect of fractionalization and inequality on the size of government. Within a political economy model of tax determination, I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience, so they care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behaviour of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institutions by examining the...

The net present value of costs and benefits from a pay-as-you-go social security system are negative for young people and positive for the elderly. If people all vote their financial selfinterest, there will be a pivotal age such that those who are younger favor smaller social security benefits...

Survey data from the United States, West Germany and East Germany are analyzed to compare individual attitudes towards political redistribution in each country. In West Germany the homo oeconomicus effect , the social rivalry effect and the public values effect simultaneously retain an...