It has been argued in the literature that, interjurisdictional competition forces the public sector to increase its efficiency and thus helps to tame Leviathan governments. The paper addresses this hypothesis by means of a simple taxcompetition model with a Leviathan state. It is seen that the...

This paper provides a political-economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making. To determine which policies are to be centralized, regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided...

Almost half of the world’s states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article is the first to explore the determinants of aid donorship. We hypothesize that democratic institutions reduce poor countries’...

This paper discusses the role of transfers in a non-cooperative environment. If reselling in-kind-transfers involves some retrading costs, in-kind transfers are supposed to realise at least some of the mutual bargaining gains which would be left unexploited by mere use of monetary payments....

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Two politicoeconomic equilibria arise from our model, one with little protection of insiders on capital and labor markets, and another one with...

This paper deals with fluctuations over time in the extent of the state-owned firm sector nationalization-privatization cycles (NPCs). Anecdotal observations of NPCs are supported threefold by systematic empirical evidence: first, for different regions and economic systems, second, for different...

In this paper redistribution policy is analyzed in a 2-period overlapping generations model with heterogeneous individuals and asymmetric information between the government and the private sector. Individuals of the same generation differ with respect to their labor productivity. In each period,...

Mit diesem theoretischen Überblick wird die These vertreten, daß sowohl die Methode als auch die Organisation der Privatisierung aus polit-ökonomischen Erwägungen von den jeweiligen Politikern ausgewählt bzw. strukturiert wird, und nicht aus transaktionskostenökonomischen oder...

This paper analyzes intergenerational redistribution in a 2-period overlapping- generations model that allows for heterogeneous labor productivities within the working generation. In each period, the government decides about redistributive transfers to maximize the aggregate utility of the...