An examination of how increased turnover among legislators in the fifty U.S. states affects fiscal policy and economic growth finds that it makes legislators short-sighted. Turnover increases the size of government by increasing the shares of both total spending and taxes in income. In...

This paper analyses whether large governments in Europe reflect efficient responses to a changing social and economic environment (‘welfare economic view’) as opposed to wasteful spending (‘public choice view’). To this end, the effect of government size on subjective well-being is...

The phenomenon of municipal capitalism, which characterizes many local governments in Italy and Europe has been subject to many studies, but none have tried to model what this could imply for the choice of the optimal regulatory rule, nor for the vertical allocation of regulatory tasks among the...

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive one disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and...

The same methodology Oecd and Ecofin apply to project future trends of health care expenditue is here applied to reconstruct backwards Italian health care expenditure. The time horizon is 1988-2012. Results are described and argued. Important evidence emerges on the historical value of the...

Despite the Government of Indonesia’s commitment to address human security as stated in its ambitious medium-term development plan and the Millennium Development Goals, poverty in its multidimensionality remain a major issue in Indonesia as a significant proportion of the Indonesian population...

In this paper we examine the determinants of ex-ante state capture analyzing all the legal acts that have been passed in the period 1990-2011 in Poland. We find that during this the majority of legal acts were passed with the aim to satisfy the interest of particular groups. Furthermore, the...

We study the effect of electoral systems on openness to immigration. According to the literature, in our model plurality systems induce a rent-seeking policymaker to get re-election through locally provided public goods rather than through transfers, whereas the opposite occurs under...

We develop a general equilibrium model of residential choice and study the effects of two housing aid policies, public housing units and housing vouchers. Land is differentiated by both residential accessibility and local public goods, and the provision levels of local public goods are...

Despite the noble concept of equity wherein every citizen has equal right to live a decent life irrespective of their socio-economic and regional/geographic characteristics, the phenomenon of inequality is persistent in everyday life of people especially those living in developing countries such...