The current international tax system diverges greatly from a theoretically ‘‘optimal’’ tax system. One reason for this discrepancy may be that politicians strive for other objectives rather than making tax rules that comply with the theoretical concepts of optimal taxation. In this...

The Great Tōhoku-Earthquake and the following nuclear meltdown in Fukushima called the world’s attention to Japans’ energy and climate policy. Japan is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouses gases in the world and is still facing problems of reaching its Kyoto target by domestic...

We provide empirical evidence that female mayors do not affect the expenditure allocation or size of local governments. This result is robust across a variety of regression discontinuity and standard multivariate estimations. We also examine whether elected female candidates have an increased...

Variations of bilateral aid flows are difficult to explain on the basis of official development objectives or recipient need. At the example of US aid to Pakistan, this paper suggests alternative political economic explanations, notably the relevance of ethnic lobbying and the relevance of US...

In this paper, we investigate the interactions among oligarchs, political parties, and voters using an agent-based modeling approach. We introduce the OLIGO model, which is based on the spatial model of democracy, where voters have positions in a policy space and vote for the party that appears...

El objetivo de este trabajo se centra en el estudio de las principales aportaciones y corrientes investigadoras actuales de la elección pública positiva. Se expone, en primer lugar, una breve reseña de las principales aportaciones de la elección pública positiva. En segundo lugar, las...

George Orwell is famous for his two final fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These two works are sometimes understood to defend capitalism against socialism. But as Orwell was a committed socialist, this could not have been his intention. Orwell's criticisms were directed not...

Although economists have usually defended the superiority of market-based instruments, and an increasing use of those measures in OECD countries has taken place, there has been (and still is) some reluctance by policy makers to use them for climate policy. The aim of this paper is to provide a...

In order to determine the optimal allocation of responsibilities in disease interventions, and in designing commitment mechanisms, the paper develops a three-period game comprising policy- makers, the international community providing financial aid, and individuals. A policy-maker chooses, in...

The main goal of this study is two-fold: (1) to provide a general overview of thecontributions to the literature on the informal sector, with a special focus on the PublicChoice approach; and (2) to compare these contributions across two institutionallydifferent types of countries: developed and...