The authors try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics, relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system.

Traditional macroeconomic policy analysis asks the positive question of how the economy responds to alternative, but exogenous, policy actions or rules. Knowing these responses, the analyst can go to the normative problem of policy advice, The best action or rule is selected, given a specific...

The postwar neoclassical theory of normative public finance has been written from a Pigovian perspective. It addresses questions about optimal taxation and allocation of public goods from the perspective of a benevolent social planner. This field of research has produced many important...

We start by arguing that to understand growth differences across countries and time, one needs to understand differences in public policies that affect the incentives for productive accumulation of capital, human capital, or technically useful knowledge. And to understand policy differences one...

Does democracy promote economic development? Despite many attempts to address this question, the answer remains elusive. Richer countries are generally democratic. But this cross-country correlation could reflect reverse causation or omitted variables. Evidence that political regime changes...