"A large literature has sought to determine whether smoking bans help or hinder restaurants. Much of the literature improperly specifies its econometric equations and thus mistakenly infers causality. Examining the relationship between restaurant smoking bans and restaurant revenues in 267...

We develop a theoretical model to analyze the role of judicial review in preventing tyrannies of the majority. The model identifies conditions under which the court's optimal role may be to allow tyranny of the majority--and the tyrannized minority will be better off as a result. This...

Considerable scholarly work has examined the transition to democracy. In this paper, we investigate a path to democracy that is very different from that typically described. During the Archaic period (800–500 BCE), many Greek poleis (city-states) replaced aristocracies with a more narrow...

In representative democracies, citizens delegate powers. Not surprisingly, citizens react angrily when the delegated powers are misused (i.e., used so as to decrease social welfare). Perhaps more puzzlingly, citizens sometimes repeatedly delegate the same power (e.g., surveillance of citizens,...

The Companion lays out a comprehensive history of the field and, in five additional parts, it explores public choice contributions to the study of the origins of the state, the organization of political activity, the analysis of decision-making in non-market institutions, the examination of...

Poorly governed (e.g., repressive) countries tend to be located near other poorly governed countries, and well governed countries near other well governed countries. Researchers, by identifying country characteristics (e.g., ethnic fractionalization) that may influence government quality, have...

Poole and Rosenthal (1997) argue that most congressional voting can be understood in terms of a low-dimensional spatial model. This paper uses their model to assess the importance of the two mechanisms that could contribute to the vote-predicting power of constituency variables: (i) constituency...

This paper develops a model to test whether World Bank lending caters to U.S. interests. We use country-level panel data to examine the geographic distribution of World Bank lending to 110 countries from 1968 to 2002. After controlling for country characteristics expected to influence the...

This paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of USAID contract spending across congressional districts within the United States. The extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years, as...