Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians' incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians' mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

Auditing institutions, such as the German Federal Court of Audit (BRH), provide information on public revenue and public spending. The question of how to increase tax compliance has been of frequent interest. Unfortunately, information from German taxpayers? declaration behaviour (beyond the...

Despite improvements in the living conditions of the population, there has not been a significant change in income disparities. Since the growth of left-wing parties and political competition as per the median voter hypothesis do not stand in the Brazilian case, what could explain the tenacity...

In John Nash’s proofs for the existence of (Nash) equilibria basedon Brouwer’s theorem, an iteration mapping is used. A continuous—time analogue of the same mapping has been studied even earlier byBrown and von Neumann. This differential equation has recently beensuggested as a plausible...

We study how rework routing together with wage and piece rate compensation can strengthen incentives for quality. Traditionally, rework is assigned back to the agent who generates the defect (in a self routing scheme) or to another agent dedicated to rework (in a dedicated routing scheme). In...

Due to their many applications, large Bayesian games have been a subject of growing interest in game theory and related fields. But to a large extent, models (1) have been restricted to one-shot interaction, (2) are based on an assumption that player types are independent and (3) assume that the...

Endogenous growth models, such as Barro (1990), predict that governmentexpenditure and taxation will have both temporary and permanent effects on growth.We test this prediction using panels of annual and period-averaged data for OECDcountries during 1970-95, isolating long-run from short-run...

By using official time series of the Italian evaded VAT base (Ministry of Finance) for the period 1980-2004 we investigate empirically the long-run characteristics of tax evasion and the relationship with the tax burden. We focus on three important issues not analyzed so far[...]

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to beimplemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashinglurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centeringaround the...