Since the last decade, there has been much debate on the central government's activism in the implementation of development policies that resemble those from Brazil's authoritarian past. However, only rarely, scholars and practitioners have discussed the state capacities that are necessary to...

This is a note on corruption and underground economy in a Kaldor-type model of the business cycle. It appears that when the economy is booming and underground activities seek to enter the official economy, bureaucrats have the upper hand but until underground businesses cannot tolerate...

Which incentives have the strongest impact on the size of the shadow economy? Is it about government's pressure against entrepreneurs operating in this sector, or is it about the benefits of legality? The goal of this paper is to explicitly contrast the role of sticks (court repressiveness) and...

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led Barro (2004) to analyze the connections between some dimensions of...

The deleterious impact of institutions of direct legislation on student performance found in studies for both the U.S. and Switzerland has raised the question of what its transmission channels are. For the U.S., an increase in the ratio of administrative to instructional spending and larger...