In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on who wants to be a politician. We take advantage of a considerable 35 percent salary increase of Finnish MPs in the year 2000, intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive. A difference-indifferences analysis, using...

This paper examines an economic union where oligopolistic firms produce by skilled and unskilled labor and do in-house Ramp;D by skilled labor. The planner of the union accepts new members to the union, regulates the labor market through a minimum wage for unskilled labor and supports firms by...

This paper examines an economy with a large number of industries, each producing a different good. Technological change follows a Poisson process where firms improve their productivity through investment in Ramp;D. The less there are firms in the economy or the more they can coordinate their...

Business and politician interaction is pervasive but has mostly been analysed with a binary approach. Yet the network dimensions of such connections are ubiquitous. We use a unique dataset for seven economies that documents politically exposed persons (PEPs) and their links to companies,...

Attorneys elected to the US Congress and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law than legislators with a different professional background. This finding is based...

Asymmetric information between voters and legislative representatives poses a major challenge to the functioning of representative democracy. We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media attention to...

It has been argued that Asia's remarkable economic achievements of the past 50 years build on institutional arrangements very different from the West, notably the central role of business groups (BGs). As Asian economies move from extensive to intensive growth, we enquire whether the business...