There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an optimal tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax systems...

This paper empirically investigates contrasting views on the politics of economic policy. Merging different databases, we test various predictions coming form different strands of literature, with the aim of explaining the cross-sectional and temporal variation in the degree of regulatory...

This paper argues that the study of policy incidence in industrial organization needs to take the endogeneity of government into account. The point is made by investigating whether political considerations are important in terms of understanding the causes and effects of deregulation using data...

This paper develops a political-economy model of price regulation. Firms' lobbying activity for a given regulatory status might generate a simultaneity problem between the effects and the determinants of regulatory decisions. We explicitly model this two way causality, and empirically test our...

This paper describes private actors' involvement in Colombia's policymaking process. While more transparent and formal channels are used to discuss horizontal policies, they are also less effective. The adoption of targeted policies, however, follows a faster track and depends more on political...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method that allows us to disentangle mechanical effects due to changes in pre-tax incomes from direct effects of policy reforms. While tax reforms implemented under Democrat administrations, in...

How did post-communist transformations affect people's perceptions of their economic and political systems? We model a pseudo-panel with 89 country-year clusters, based on 13 countries observed between 1991 and 2004, to identify the macro and institutional drivers of the public opinion. Our main...

Immigration is one of the most hotly debated policy issues in the United States today. Despite marked divergence of opinions within political parties, several important immigration reforms were introduced in the post 1965 era. The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the drivers of...

This review paper articulates the relationship between prediction market data and event studies, with a special focus on applications in political economy. Event studies have been used to address a variety of political economy questions - from the economic effects of party control of government...

In recent years, differences between traditional and green parties have been leveled with respect to climate protection. We show that this partial convergence in party platforms can be explained by international climate agreements, effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We set up a...