A lisszaboni szerződés módosítja az Európai Unió legfőbb döntéshozó szervében, az Európai Unió Tanácsában alkalmazott minősített többségi szavazás szabályait. A jelenleg érvényben levő mechanizmusban az országok súlyait - politikai alkuk eredményeképpen - a nizzai...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' ’and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of...

I consider a heterogeneous federal system in which policy coordination is desirable but underprovided in the absence of a federal intervention. To improve policy coordination, the federal layer can intervene by imposing bounds on local policies. These federal bounds define a restricted policy...

We propose a new empirical approach to analyzing fiscal decentralization and apply it to Chinese intergovernmental fiscal relationships between the central government and provincial governments. In calculating budgetary revenue and expenditure shares, we include extra budgetary revenue and...

This paper analyzes secessions through the lens of representative democratic institutions and considers the incentives of partisan political parties to support independence movements.  It points out that, if anything, separatists should expect to receive support from exactly the "unlike-minded"...

In federal countries, competence for policy matters is often shared between various levels of government. As only overall outcomes are observed, this might blur accountability by decreasing voters' ability to infer information about the performance of their leaders. In this article, we analyse...

The paper investigates the influence of outside options on the predatory behavior of autocrats. An outside option is referred to as the opportunity of an incumbent ruler to continue his career outside his current territory of control. The paper uses data on the effectiveness of tax collection...