Previous empirical studies analysing the effect of electoral systems on growth lack unanimous answers as they miss-specify mixed systems in the empirical setting, that is, they neglect to consider the proportionality degree of mixed electoral systems. This work supplies the missing answers by...

Economic and political literature widely studied the effects of electoral system on corruption. But very little attention has been dedicated to the role of political competition in explaining this relationship. We hypothesize that the proportionality degree of the electoral system impacts...

This paper aims to the analysis of the rules electoral effects on fiscal policy, respect to the Italian case: in fact Italy, since 1861 until nowadays, modified several times its electoral system, switching from the majoritarian to the proportional system. In particular here we focus on the...

Corruption is a problem that has been shown to adversely affect a country’s development. Recent studies have shown that a country’s electoral system can affect its corruption level. But if that is the case, then electoral rules could be chosen to maximize opportunities for corruption. This...

I exploit the unique institution of gender-segregated voting booths in Chile, allowingthe use of actual voting data, instead of self-reported surveys, to test for genderbias among voters. Overall I find evidence of a small but significant negative genderbias: women overall are less likely than...

The ongoing process of democratisation lead to the growing importance of the electoral systems that regulate the procedures of gaining and legitimizing power in democracy. Taking it into account it is worth asking about the relationship between these particular ‘game rules’ contained into...

We study the harmonization of the base remuneration for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were previously paid like national parliamentarians implying large differences between the delegations from the 27 member countries. Based on detailed information on individual MEPs between...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium “States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy” at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

This paper revisits the issue of law enforcement and the design of monetary sanctions when the public law enforcer's incentives depart from those of a benevolent authority, which is the most frequent assumption made in the literature on crime deterrence. We …rst consider the case of an elected...