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American Democracy and the Problem of Fiscal Deficits

Wagner, Richard E. - 2018

Most theorists of public finance treat budgeting as a technical problem concerned centrally with projecting revenues and expenses. To the contrary, I treat budgeting as a political problem, with technical matters serving to obscure more than illuminate the political economy of budgeting. This...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012906539

What Kind of State in Our Future? Fact and Conjecture in Vito Tanzi's Government Versus Markets

Wagner, Richard E. - 2013

This is a review essay on Vito Tanzi's "Government versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State." The bulk of this book looks backward on the relative growth of government from late in the 19th century until recent times when that growth seems to have stopped in many places. Tanzi...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013087949

Electoral Accountability and Responsive Democracy

Duggan, John - 2015

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013022706

Public Debt within Systems of Monopolistic Democracy

Eusepi, Giuseppe - 2016

Democratic Political Economy. This paper modifies the benchmark condition of a cooperative democracy to incorporate a realistic … treatment of democracy where there exist islands of political power within a relatively passive sea of generally modest … democratic participation. This essay explains that descriptions of democracy as entailing self-governance are typically mythical …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012980199

Budgeting and Public Debt within a System of Cooperative Democracy

Eusepi, Giuseppe - 2016

This paper is the penultimate draft of the fourth of six chapters of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay establishes an analytical benchmark of a democratic system in which political outcomes reflect genuine consensus among the participants. This...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012980202

Indebted State versus Intermediary State : Who Owes What to Whom?

Eusepi, Giuseppe; Wagner, Richard E. - 2011

Ratios of public debt to GDP are much discussed these days and questions concerning debt relative to taxation have long been explored by fiscal scholars. With respect to monarchical regimes, it seems reasonable to treat public debt as similar to personal debt, recognizing that a monarch is not...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014180612

Rationality, Political Economy, and Fiscal Responsibility : Wrestling with Tragedy on the Fiscal Commons

Wagner, Richard E. - 2011

The continuing budget deficits and accumulating public debt that commonly plagues western democracies reflects a clash between two rationalities regarding human governance: one of private property and its conventions and one of common property and its procedural framework. The clashing of these...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014180613

Fiscal Crisis as Failure of Progressivist Democracy

Wagner, Richard E. - 2015

it resides in the morphing of a constitutional system of limited democracy into one of progressivist or oligarchic … democracy. The clear and present danger is that the present crisis will end up strengthening the conservative forces of … progressivist democracy and its program of continually extending the reach of politics into society. The avoidance of that danger …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014136830

How Special Is Democracy? An Experimental Study of Recommendations in the Minimum Effort Game

Mollerstrom, Johanna; Sunstein, Cass R. - 2020

Democratic institutions aggregate voters’ preferences about policy options and thereby help determine which policies are implemented. Previous research has, however, suggested that such institutions can also have a direct, positive effect on cooperative and efficient behavior. In a laboratory...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014090184

Constitutional Reform, Rent Extraction, and Economic Development in China

Congleton, Roger D. - 2011

This paper analyzes the constitutional history of China, with the aim of explaining how and why the policies that produced its rapid growth came to be adopted. The paper argues that constitutional reforms played important roles in China's economic development and are likely to do so in the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014175221