What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of two key expenditure categories (current and public investment spending) during the different phases of the business cycle (good times and bad times). Anecdotal evidence suggests that policymakers usually cannot resist the temptation of spending more...

Latin America is widely acknowledged as one of the most unequal regions of the world (Sánchez-Ancochea 2021). But it is also one of the most democratic, certainly as compared to other developing regions. These two facts seem difficult to reconcile. Both folk theories of democratic...

This paper surveys selected themes in the political economy of policymaking in Latin America, with an emphasis on recent research focusing on actual decision and implementation processes, and on the political institutions and state and social actors involved in those processes. In particular,...

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the...

We explore whether environmental motivation affects environmental behavior by focusing on volunteering. The paper first introduces a theoretical model of volunteering in environmental organizations. In a next step, it tests the hypothesis working with a large micro data set covering 32 countries...

This paper analyzes the effect of spillovers and congestion of local public goods on the segregative properties of endogenous formation of jurisdiction. Households living in the same place form a jurisdiction and produce a local public good, that creates positive spillovers in other...

Fiscal considerations may shift governmental priorities away from environmental concerns: Finance ministers face strong demand for public expenditures such as infrastructure investments but they are constrained by international tax competition. We develop a multi-region model of tax competition...

The paper investigates the relationship between environmental participation and littering. Previous empirical work in the area of littering is scarce as is evidence regarding the determinants of littering behavior. We address these deficiencies, demonstrating a strong empirical link between...