This paper argues that corruption patterns are endogenous to political structures. Thus, corruption can be systemic and planned rather than decentralized and coincidental. In an economic system without law or property rights, a kleptocratic state may arise as a predatory hierarchy from a state...

Die Governance der Zentralbanken hat zwei Dimensionen: Corporate Governance und Public Governance. Public Governance ist ein institutioneller Rahmen, wobei die breite Öffentlichkeit eine Zentralbank regelt durch und durch die Legislative und Exekutive in einem Land. Dieses Papier argumentiert,...

Woman surage led to the greatest enfranchisement in the history of the United States.Before World War I, however, surage states remained almost exclusively conned to theAmerican West. The reasons for this pioneering role of the West are still unclear. Studyingthe timing of woman surage adoption...

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical inmost industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop adynamic political economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expendituresprovide insurance...

Both conventional wisdom and leading academic research view pork barrel spendingas antithetical to responsible policymaking in times of crisis. In this paper we presentan alternative view. When agents are heterogeneous in their ideology and in theirinformation about the economic situation,...

The aim of the paper is to study the relation between the demand for human rights and foreconomic prosperity. It analyzes the demand not, as it is often done in the literature, from the“voice” perspective (political activity), but rather looks at the “exit” perspective...

This paper introduces a democratic voting process into an OLG economyin order to analyze the effects of a rising old-age dependency ratio on the composition ofgovernment spending and endogenous economic growth. Forward-looking agents vote eachperiod on the public policy mix between productive...

The determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in politicaleconomy. Here, we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems.Having a more informed and politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governmentsto be responsive. This...

We discuss political economy mechanisms which can explain the resource curse,in which an increase in the size of resource rents causes a decrease in the economy’stotal value added. We identify a number of channels through which resource rentswill alter the incentives of a political leader....

Recent developments in voting theory show that Condorcet profiles embedded in electoratesare responsible for conflicts between pairwise voting methods and for reversals ofrankings under positional methods whenever candidates are dropped or added. Because ofthe strong symmetry of the rankings of...