We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from...

In random voting, the committee chair, whose vote decides in the case of a draw, is more often decisive than ordinary voters. Therefore, in the power indices literature, the committee chair is said to be more powerful. Players with a veto right are even more powerful still. Similarly, the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on how budget referendums affect school inputs by taking advantage of an exogenous enactment of budget referendums for small city school districts (SCSDs) in New York State in 1998. The paper shows that SCSDs reduce instructional spending and increase...

This paper uses the Swedish municipal amalgamation reform of 1952 to study the common pool problem in politics. The amalgams were common pools and the municipalities had incentives to free-ride on their amalgam partners by increasing debt prior to amalgamation. We find that municipalities that...

The paper examines the determinants of the assignment of EU funds to Portuguese municipalities using a large and unexplored dataset covering all (278) mainland municipalities over fifteen years. Empirical results reveal that besides normative objectives, the national government also takes into...

This paper studies rent-seeking contests where the contestants do not know the number of actively competing contestants. Two models are compared. In the first, all players are risk neutral; in the second, all have constant absolute risk aversion. If the expected fraction of active contestants is...

We show how choice of the method of measuring the party positions impacts the conclusions about equilibrium positions of parties in a spatial model. We find that for the same set of voters’ ideal points we should observe either divergence or convergence to the mean, depending on the choice of...

In 2001 the Italian government introduced a personal income tax reform to be implemented in successive phases. In 2004 taxes were reduced to all income levels with higher gains for low-income and high-income individuals than for middle-income ones. A large debate arised. This paper explores the...