This paper investigates - in a large heterogeneous sample - the relationship between social preferences on the one hand, and socioeconomic factors and political preferences on the other hand. Socioeconomic factors correlate with social preferences, and social preferences robustly shape political...

Givings - government acts that enhance property value - are omnipresent. Givings and takings are mirror images of one another, and of equal practical and theoretical importance, but the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment has enabled takings to dominate scholarly attention. This Article makes...

We examine democratic public-good provision with heterogeneous legislators. Decisions are taken by majority rule and an agenda-setter proposes a level of the public good, taxes, and subsidies. Members are heterogeneous with respect to their benefits from the public good. We find that, depending...

Exploiting a natural voting experiment we identify female preferences for real policy issues in the electorate. We then analyze whether female or male politicians in parliament more closely correspond to female preferences. Holding constant revealed constituent preferences, there is generally no...

This paper analyzes tax competition theory in an experimental setting. Economically trained students act as government and must select a labor and a capital tax rate to fund a public good, both in closed and open economy settings. Several results emerge: i) There is only weak evidence that...

This paper provides a comparison of tax morale between inhabitants of East and WestGermany in its post-reunification period, using three World Values Survey/European ValuesSurvey waves between 1990 and 1999. German reunification is particularly interesting for theanalysis of tax morale as it is...

In this paper we use a classroom exercise to reveal the main efficiency and equity aspects of the Tiebout hypothesis. We conduct and extend the exercise developed by Brouhle et al (2005) by including a second phase in which students have the opportunity to evaluate the implications of the...

We study the effect of a payoff advantage, symmetric payoff change and policymakers interaction on choices in tax competition games. To examine the first two effects a standard symmetric game is respectively compared to an asymmetric game where one player has a payoff advantage and to another...

Researchers in a number of fields have explored the question of why people voluntarily comply with the tax laws. The resulting scholarship suggests that a number of factors influence that decision, but the precise role of, and interaction between, those factors continue to be subjects of debate....

A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a...