This paper examines the role that political factors play in the investment location decisions of multinational enterprises. It has been found that foreign direct investors shy away from countries with excessive government spending, especially when this spending is directed towards the military....

The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can enhance their reputation purely with new or more extensive...

The main contribution of this paper is the development of a novel and versatile methodology to identify economic reforms. The methodology is a combination of the Bai & Perron structural break filter, and validation of the structural breaks identified using de jure evidence of reforms. The...

In this paper, I examine how the two dimensions of income inequality and ethnic diversity affect the formation of political coalitions and the reallocation of income. I construct a legislative bargaining model to analyze when coalitions form along the income dimension and when it forms along the...

We examine the empirical relationship between the institutions of economic freedom and labor shares in a panel of up to 93 countries covering 1970 through 2009. We find that a standard deviation increase in the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) score is associated with about...

This paper investigates the importance of political ideology for the choice of the tax structure. In particular, we examine the effects of cabinet ideology on the distribution of the tax burden across factors of production and consumption for 16 OECD countries over the period 1970–2000 by...

An adversarial game is used to model a firm's intrinsic and exerted influence over a regulator. Data from the World Business Environment Survey provide strong evidence in support of model hypotheses across a wide range of government agents, countries, and regulatory areas. Of particular...

It is often argued that countries with a high population share of children and young workers should attract large capital inflows from aging industrialized economies. However, many of these countries deter foreign investors by a high risk of creeping or outright expropriation. In this paper we...

This paper examines the influence of government ideology, political institutions and globalization on the choice of exchange rate regime via panel multinomial logit approach using annual data over the period of 1974–2004 in a panel of 180 countries: 26 developed and 154 developing.

We investigate the impact of conditional cash transfers (CCT) on the level of public education expenditures chosen by majority voting. In our model, parents may send their children to work, instead of sending them to (public or private) school. CCT may affect the choice of tax rate by altering...