This analysis reflects the presumption that the principal-agent relationship is central to an understanding of government spending. Our model's structure is adapted from Jack Hirshleifer's (1970) use of the state-preference theory of decision-making under uncertainty to delimit the information...

This paper uses a public choice framework to consider the impact of Congressional adoption of a biennial federal budget. The introductory chapters detail the evolution of the current Congressional annual budget and explain how budgetary institutions affect the power structures inside Congress....

This paper develops a political-economy model of the budget process focusing on the common pool problem of the public budget. We show that the externality arising from the fact that public spending tends to be targeted at individual groups in society while the tax burden is widely dispersed...

Based on the median voter theorem, we propose an econometric model for estimating local demand for public education. We test the hypothesis that public expenditures associated to this sector are induced by the presence of certain factors of social, economic, geographic, and demographic nature....

Despite the Founding Fathers' careful planning, the reason for the public's lack of confidence in Congress is that elections, like the institutional checks and balances of federalism and separation of powers, are necessary but not sufficient to ensure that Congress acts in the best interests of...

This paper extends the game-theoretic model of Von Hagen and Harden (1995) that analyzes the impact of fiscal discipline on budgetary outcomes.It analyzes the effects on budgetary outcomes of both fiscal and monetary discipline, which are evaluated with respect to the relevant institutional...

Raising the effectiveness of Italy’s public sector is more urgent than ever. It will be key to revive investment and productivity and improve access to quality public services for the most vulnerable. The quality of public goods and services is variable, weakening Italy’s resilience to...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to non-optimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

In 2005 Russian Federation moved from the elections of the regional governor to their appointment by the federal center. The study analyzes the possible changes in the regional governments fiscal policy due to the change of the preferences aggregation mechanism at the regional level. It includes...

This document presents a new framework for the the study of the political economy of the budget process building on the very profuse available literature on budget processes, fiscal policy, and institutions in Latin America. It adds emphasis to the role of actors, the role of the budget process...