The political left turn in Latin America, which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more, challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior. This paper generalizes the forward-looking voter model to a broad range of dynamic, non-concave income...

We find anecdotal evidence suggesting that governments in poor countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries. Thus, it appears that capitalist rhetoric doesn't flow to poor countries. A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more widespread in poor countries,...

The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in many countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the dynamic vitality' of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s...

We present a new theory of pervasive shortages under socialism, based on the assumption that the planners are self-interested. Because the planners -- meaning bureaucrats in the ministries and managers of firms -- cannot keep the official profits that firms earn, it is in their interest to...

This paper explores the changing role of government involvement in health care financing policy outside the United States. It provides a review of the economics literature in this area to understand the implications of recent policy changes on efficiency, costs and quality. Our review reveals...

We analyze the influence of health and financial incentives on the retirement behavior of older workers in France, building upon Stock and Wise (1990) option value approach. The model accounts for three main retirement routes: the normal retirement, disability insurance (DI) and...

This paper shows that collateral constraints restrict entrepreneurial activity. Our empirical strategy uses variations in local house prices as shocks to the value of collateral available to individuals owning a house and controls for local demand shocks by comparing entrepreneurial activity of...

This paper introduces a general equilibrium model of endogenous technical change through basic and applied research. Basic research differs from applied research in the nature and the magnitude of the generated spillovers. We propose a novel way of empirically identifying these spillovers and...

This paper introduces dynamics in the R&D-to-innovation and innovation-to-productivity relationships, which have mostly been estimated on cross-sectional data. It considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated...