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...

This paper analyses a political force that can cause an initial expansion of public spending on higher education and an ensuing decline in subsidies per student: the increase in the number, and thus voting power, of skilled parents. The rise of the skilled class leads to a majority for an...

We compare a uniform voucher regime against the status quo mix of public and private education, focusing on the distribution of welfare gains and losses across households by income. We argue that the topping-up option available under uniform vouchers is not sufficiently valuable for the poorer...

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...

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...

Data on campaign contributions of PACs (political action committees) in the US does not contain the PACs' issues of concern. Additionally, while recent US lobbying data details the issues of concern for an interest group, it does not detail the Congressional representatives lobbied by the...