This paper examines the relation between political corruption and the composition of public spending. A rent-seeking model is used to describe political rent creation through the composition of public spending. Political corruption is indicated by empirical results for 29 OECD countries for the...

Theoretical developments in political economy analyses of intergovernmental transfers identify several factors previously ignored in the empirical literature and emphasize the importance of institutional details. Combined, these two developments create a degrees of freedom problem and make cross...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional...

This paper revisits the question of why more open countries tend to have bigger governments. We replicate successfully the main results of Ram (2009), who rejects the role of country size as an omitted variable. However, several extensions advise against a hasty conclusion: The results differ...

The prediction that economic freedom is beneficial in reducing corruption has not been found to be universally robust in empirical studies. The present work reviews this relationship by using firms' data in a cross-country survey and argues that approaches using aggregated macro data have not...

This article uses unique voting data on 331 federal propositions to estimate voter preferences in Swiss cantons. We document that preferences vary systematically with cantonal characteristics. In particular, cantons whose voters are more conservative, less in favor of redistribution and less...

We analyze the effect of gender quotas on electoral participation by using a dataset regarding Italian municipal elections. Gender quotas were in force in Italy from 1993 to 1995. Given the short period covered by the reform, some municipalities never voted using a gender quota. We identify a...

This paper analyzes the effects of voter turnout on the vote shares received by the incumbent government. A system of simultaneous equations is estimated using a panel dataset of 278 Portuguese municipalities, for the period 1979–2005, covering 10 legislative elections. The results indicate...

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...

Policymakers generally have powerful incentives to attract votes by strategically manipulating public policies, for instance by increasing public spending during election periods or by implementing ideologically valued policies for their electoral base. At first sight, public theaters and...