In a federal union, a referendum paradox occurs each time a decision taken by representatives elected in separate jurisdictions (districts, states, regions) conflicts with the decision that would have been adopted if the voters had directly given their opinion via a referendum (Nurmi 1999)....

Using a panel of 24 OECD countries, we study the link between the autonomy of sub-national governments and the quality of governance of a country. The results show that fiscal autonomy worsens citizens' perceptions of governance quality. In particular, the delegation of policy responsibilities...

Are the Scandinavian countries more redistributive than the US? Given the impression of Scandinavian egalitarianism one may conjecture that they redistribute more, but there is not irrefutable support for this in the literature. In general, the relationship between income inequality and...

We empirically test the prediction that the personal attributes of the legislators critically determine the legislative performance of a legislature in an Indian context. Analyzing the data on the Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in the state of Tamil Nadu in the 2006-11 Assembly...

The Economic Freedom of North America is a widely used political economy indicator related to outcomes such as entrepreneurship, equity prices, housing prices, and migration. As a result, relative rankings are often mentioned in policy discussions. The ranking of regions based on economic...

This paper examines the endogenous choice between democracy and conflict in a scenario with different social classes in terms of income inequality and with parties representing each of the two social classes. We consider how the change in economic inequality between the poor and rich people...

Taxpayers are considerably interested in tax planning for intergenerational transfers (inter vivos gifts and bequests) that minimize the payment of taxes. Nordblom and Ohlsson (2006) demonstrated that (1) altruistic parents avoid tax payment by changing the timing of transfers when inter vivos...

Propensity score matching is used to estimate the size of the public sector pay premium in four countries. Three sets of matching covariates are used; worker characteristics only, then including job attributes and finally adding union membership. When worker characteristics and job attributes are...