Swofford and Whitney (1987) investigated the validity of two types of assumptions that underlie the representative agent models of modern macroeconomics and monetary economics. These assumptions are utility maximization and weak or functional separability that is required for an economic...

Swofford and Whitney (1987) investigated the validity of two types of assumptions that underlie the representative agent models of modern macroeconomics and monetary economics. These assumptions are utility maximization and weak or functional separability that is required for an economic...

I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than...

The goal of this paper is twofold: First, to develop an estimable model of legislative politics in the US Congress, second, to provide a greater understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the theoretical model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the...

There are several theoretical accounts of public sector outsourcing. We note that leading theories give different predictions of the influence of political variables and test the predictions on a Swedish data set in which outsourcing varies between municipalities and over time as well as between...

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied. An alternative approach - of limiting the focus to studies of the...

We study the effect of political polarization on government spending and redistribution using the dispersion of self-reported political preferences as our measure of polarization. Politically polarized countries have lower levels of redistribution and government consumption. The relationship...

A wide range of services provided by the public sector are credence goods, i.e., services for which the producer has private information whether a certain treatment is needed or not. This paper studies how ownership affects the incentives for producers to reveal such information to public...

I construct a model of public policy development, and use the model to explain why the United States has a comparatively small public sector, but instead a large private welfare state with employment-based benefits. The key factors are politically organized firms and labor unions. These interest...

In this paper we present survey evidence suggesting that there exists a sizeable fiscal illusion amongst the general public in Sweden. Respondents in a nation-wide and representative survey systematically underestimate the share of an ordinary worker's income that is transferred to the public...