In their book The Power to Tax, Brennan and Buchanan have pointed to a central weakness of the traditional theory of public finance and especially of the theory of optimal taxation: This approach overlooked the problem of governmental power and the tendency of this power to be abused. It was...

Nach dem Zusammenbruch der sozialistischen Systeme vollzogen die betroffenen Ländern Mittel- und Osteuropas in unterschiedlichem Tempo und sequencing den Weg zu Demokratie und einer marktwirtschaftlichen Wirtschaftsordnung. Die polit-ökonomischen Probleme bei der Durchsetzung der umfassenden...

Die Globalisierung wird von der Politik als ein Problem dargestellt und von der Öffentlichkeit skeptisch betrachtet. Welche Erkenntnisse hat die Wirtschaftswissenschaft zum Phänomen „Globalisierung“? Sind die Probleme „Arbeitslosigkeit“ und „Krise der sozialen Sicherungssysteme“...

In this paper the political economy of revolutions is revisited, as it has been developed and applied in a number of publications by Acemoglu and Robinson. We criticize the fact that these authors abstract from collective-action problems and focus on inequality of income or wealth instead. In...

This paper revisits the relation between democracy, liberalization, and prosperity in transition countries, using a panel of 25 countries over 19 years. Earlier investigations found political and economic liberalization to be positively correlated whereas the relation between political...

We develop a model of insurrection markets and integrate the youth bulge as measured by the relative youth cohort size. As youth-specific characteristics we define the young person's attitude toward revolutionary groups and the government, the degree of risk aversion and the relative...

Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an...

We develop a simple model of an insurrection market based on a kleptocratic politico-economic institutional setting, within which a certain government elite holds both all central government position and all productive assets. The kleptocratic setting provokes the appearance of insurrection...

We explore the supply side of the market for suicide bombers. While the strategic edge of suicide attacks for certain terrorist organizations has been thoroughly explored, the motivation of the suppliers remains quite mysterious. Following a review of existing theoretical approaches and...