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...

Most of the developing nations are still struggling for efficient use of their resources. In order to overcome physical and administrative constraints of the development, it is necessary to transfer the power from the central government to local authorities. Distribution of power from improves...

While many economists have theorized and/or empirically demonstrated that labor-leisure decisions are influenced by the rate of taxation, this note introduces a new mechanism in which the collecting of taxes on income may affect such decisions. Although standard models assume that agents have no...

Starting from the median voter model commonly used in the literature to analyse the determinants of the functional distribution of public spending, we propose a new multiproduct dynamic model that also allows one to classify the nature of the interaction –complementarity or...

This note proposes a research agenda for studying the implications of enhanced capital mobility and limited de facto exchange rate flexibility for the conduct of macroeconomic stabilization. The ineffectiveness of monetary policy under such conditions suggests a greater role for fiscal policy as...

This paper analyzes the government's choice of three proportional tax bases (a consumption tax, a wage tax and a capital income tax) and its influence on the steady-state levels of capital accumulation and social welfare under fiscal federalism and the unitary system. We report two main...