J. Kalt and M. Zupan have measured ideological shirking by legislators. Here the authors present evidence concerning nonideological shirking. They demonstrate that representatives with more overdrawn checks tend to be more fiscally irresponsible, with fiscal irresponsibility measured by National...

This paper documents the functioning of the market in trade protection. It uses a narrative approach to demonstrate that politicians respond to the demands of special interests by forcing open foreign markets and by closing domestic markets. In the process government officials violate property...

This paper analyzes representatives' voting patterns on NAFTA. The public choice model posits that representatives vote to redistribute wealth to constituents. Evidence presented here indicates that the Heckscher-Ohlin model is appropriate to represent the redistributional effects of NAFTA....