Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

The need to absorb windfalls gains and manage them appropriately has been discussed extensively by academics and policy makers alike. We explore the role of the financial sector in intermediating these windfalls. Controlling for the level of financial development, inflation, GDP growth and...

How globalisation influences social expenditure has been examined for industrialized countries. Globalisation has often been shown to be positively associated with social expenditure in established industrialized countries, a finding that corroborates the compensation hypothesis. Scholars have...

Pension systems have recently been under scrutiny because of the expected population ageing threatening its sustainability. This paper's contribution to the debate is from a political economic perspective as it uses data from a Choice Experiment to investigate individual preferences for an...

This paper presents estimates of world output growth from 1970 to 2000, the distribution of income among countries and persons for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000, and world poverty rates for the same years. It also presents the results of a series of simulation exercises that attempt isolate the...

This paper focuses on the role of institutions in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

This paper reviews the U.S. welfare reform efforts over the 1990s and the effects of these reforms to date. Seven lessons of potential interest to European observers are discussed, with particular attention to the conclusions of more recent research. Such research indicates, for example, that...

This article analyses the dynamics of electoral promises, building on an electoral competition model with endogenous policies. It extends the Grossman-Helpman (1994) model [Grossman G., Helpman E. [1994], "Protection for sale", American Economic Review, 84, 4, 833-850] to include sanctions from...

The pay-as-you-go social security system, which suffers from dwindling labor force, can benefit from immigrants with birth rates that exceed the native-born birth rates in the host country. Thus, a social security system provides effectively an incentive to liberalize migration policy. The paper...

Four types of economicsʺ relevant for institutional analysis are distinguished: Standard Neoclassical Economics; Socio-Economics or Social Economics; New Institutional Economics; and Psychological Economics (often misleadingly called Behavioural Economics). The paper argues that an extension of...