This research looks at the determinants of the adoption of the school-rhythm reform by French municipalities. The possibility opened to mayors to adopt the reform sooner (2013) or later (2014) offers the opportunity to measure how much the interests of the children have weighted on the decision....

Using a new Colombian data set (1830-2000), we analyze how changes in the electoral legislation with regard to the characteristics of voters (in terms of education and income levels) has affected fiscal policy in electoral times. In line with economic theory, we show that after the law was...

We distinguish between (i) voting systems in which voters can rank candidates and (ii) those in which they can grade candidates, such as approval voting, in which voters can give two grades—approve (1) or not approve (0)—to candidates. While two grades rule out a discrepancy between the...

We propose a differential game approach to analyze two--candidate competition in a la Hotelling game with candidates simultaneously choosing locations and investment in valence. We find a Markov perfect equilibrium in which candidates choose divergent locations. Divergence from the median is...

This paper formulates a simple mathematical framework for the selection of an optimum "relative unanimity” collective decision rule. The approach is first to identify the benefits of moving from a rule of simple majority towards a rule of full unanimity. Then, the costs of moving from simple...

In the last decade, Italy has experienced a considerable decentralization of functions to the regions. This transformation has been especially relevant for the National Health System that has de facto assumed a federal system design. The federal reform aimed at disciplining public health...

The paper discusses opportunities to utilize the series of micro-blogs as provided by the Twitter in observation of opinion dynamics. The spontaneity of tweets is more, as the service is attached more to the mobile communications. The extraction of information in the series of tweets is...