This research looks at the determinants of the adoption of the school-rhythm reform by French municipalities. The possibility opened to mayors to adopt the reform sooner (2013) or later (2014) offers the opportunity to measure how much the interests of the children have weighted on the decision....

How do inflows of unauthorized immigrants shape elections? Political economy theories often yield competing predictions and mixed empirical results. The main hurdle of empirically evaluating the impact of unauthorized immigrants on election outcomes is finding reliable data that can measure...

We show that voters are fiscal conservatives, although in the long run only: while the average (over the mandate) level of debt has a negative impact on the probability of reelection, pre-election debt accumulation by incumbents increases their probability of reelection. As the negative impact...

Varma proposes new political and electoral reforms for better, healthy and improved democracy to remove inequalities, corruption, unemployment and mis-governance. This new political and electoral reforms are aimed at empowering under privileged, working class, rural and urban areas.

The ruling political party or the ruling government has rights in drafting and implementing economic policies including the budget policy. In the case of Malaysia, as observed, the budget policy is associated with the long or medium term economic development plans that are drafted, current...

Election results are generally hard to predict, and India is no exception. This paper discusses the factors that are important in explaining the results of the 2009 parliamentary elections in India. Our results show that the voters prefer the candidates who have served in the parliament before,...

In late April 2013, Jim O’Neill retired as chairman of Goldman Sachs (GS). The 56-year-old British economist, among other accomplishments, left his mark on the still unfolding globalization story by coining the acronym BRIC, referring to the four rapidly developing nations—Brazil, Russia,...

This paper examines the response of voters to candidates who have reported that they have criminal charges against them, within the framework of a simple analytical model which assumes that criminal charges give rise to some stigma amongst the electorate, and result in a negative effect on vote...

Scholars have long deplored voters' lack of interest in politics and argue greater political engagement would improve the performance of democracy. We consider a model of elections where successful communication of political messages during campaigns requires efforts by politicians and a...

Using a new Colombian data set (1830-2000), we analyze how changes in the electoral legislation with regard to the characteristics of voters (in terms of education and income levels) has affected fiscal policy in electoral times. In line with economic theory, we show that after the law was...