Solid budgets serve as important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians might therefore face an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regarded as a key element for budget setups. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, in this study we systematically...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of...

Did austerity cause Brexit? This paper shows that the rise of popular support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), as the single most important correlate of the subsequent Leave vote in the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum, along with broader measures of political dissatisfaction, are...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all...

What determines citizens satisfaction with the constitution in operation ? We make two contributions towards an answer to this important policy question. First, we place stronger emphasis than existing studies on quantitative interpretations of the importance of different factors. We use...

Financial crises are traditionally analyzed as purely economic phenomena. The political economy of financial booms and busts remains both under-emphasized and limited to isolated episodes. The policy discussions and economic literature generated by the most recent wave of financial crises have...

This is a preliminary draft of the third of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter contrasts two approaches to working with the compound noun “political economy.” The standard,...

Financial crises are traditionally analyzed as purely economic phenomena. The political economy of financial booms and busts remains both under-emphasized and limited to isolated episodes. This paper examines the political economy of financial policy during ten of the most infamous financial...

We analyze the effect of state visits by the Catholic pope on human rights in the host country to illustrate how a small theocracy like the Vatican can exert significant political influence in international politics. Our theoretical model of the strategic interaction between the Catholic Church...