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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
We use a database generated by a policy intervention that incentivized learning as measured by standardized exams to investigate empirically the relationship between cheating by students and cash incentives to students and teachers. We adapt methods from the education measurement literature to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013022704
Violent conflict destroy resources. It generates "destruction costs." These costs have an important effect on individual's decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals' investment in "arms" - the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013120852