Does stiffer electoral competition reduce political shirking? For a micro-analysis of this question, I construct a new data set spanning the years 2005 to 2012 covering biographical and political information about German Members of Parliament (MPs), including their attendance rates in voting...

As institutions matter for political and economic outcomes, they are (at least partly) shaped by the interests of political agents acting under these limitations. However, empirical evidence documenting such endogenous change of institutions is scarce. We address the issue by examining the link...

This paper examines the empirical regularity that in Canada business cycle peaks and federal elections have tended to arise together over the long post-Confederation time period following 1867. We argue that rather than being simultaneous, the two events are related sequentially and that...

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...

Regulation of campaign finance of political parties and candidates is intended to decrease the political influence of special interest groups and enhance the public interest in electoral outcomes. I investigate empirically the consequences of campaign financing regulations and find that public...

In this paper we aim to understand how bounded rationality affects performance of democratic institutions. We consider policy choice in a representative democracy when voters do not fully anticipate a politician's strategic behavior to manipulate his reelection chances. We find that this limited...

The objective of this paper is to study the relationship between the demand for human rights and the demand for economic prosperity from the “exit” perspective, looking at migration patterns. We investigate intra-national migration in India, which is a federation of various states that...

It is well established that individual parliamentary representatives are less likely to decide according to the preferences of their constituency when the number of representatives per district, i.e. district magnitude, increases. However, we propose that for majority decisions of district...

Research on the political budget cycle suggests that some budget items are more visible than others. Accordingly, the cycle will exert a varying impact on policy instruments of different salience. Using a panel data set of tariff decisions by Austrian local governments we identify a stable and...

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...