This paper explores for economists how the school-finance litigation movement, which began with Serrano v. Priest in 1971, ought to be characterized in economic models. Its primary message is that this has become a national movement, not one confined to individual states. Economists should be...

We augment the mechanism used in Nash implementation with a political process that collects the opinions of a subset of individuals with a xed probability distribution. The outcome is a function of only the collected opinions. We show that the necessary - and sometimes sufficient - condition for...

Opinion polls and other surveys are used to capture public sentiments on a variety of issues. If citizens are unwilling to reveal certain policy preferences to others, surveys may fail to characterize population preferences accurately. The innovation of this paper is to use unique data to...

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principalagentproblem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principal-agent problem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

The article deals with the legislative possibilities of perfection of the existing forms of direct democracy and participation of the population in local government to increase their demands on the municipal practice and to create the most convenient mechanism for the municipal union, giving...

Opinion polls and other surveys are used to capture public sentiments on a variety of issues. If citizens are unwilling to reveal certain policy preferences to others, surveys may fail to characterize population preferences accurately. The innovation of this paper is to use unique data to...

Voter initiatives are important for policy making in many countries. While much research shows that the initiative process affects policy choices, almost no evidence explains how the initiative process affects policy. Initiatives might change policy directly through voters approving laws that...

This study contains further evidence on the economic effects of direct democratic institutions. A first study found that countries with national initiatives have higher government expenditure and are characterized by more rent-seeking activity, that the effects of direct democratic institutions...