This paper investigates pork-barrel spending, the inefficient effect of legislature size on public spending, in at-large electoral systems. Using a rich panel data set on German municipalities whose councils are elected at-large, we employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal...

We present a novel account of China's recent move to decentralize legislation through amending the Law on Legislation (LL). Conventional wisdom pervading both Chinese political discourse and social scientific scholarship on China portrays law as incompatible with experimentation and as only...

Australian tax reform generally follows a three stage process involving: policy formulation, legislation design and a post implementation review. This paper examines the legislation design stage of the tax reform processes associated with the 1999 Review of Business Taxation chaired by John...

Institutional and political forces create strong inertial pressures that make the updating of legislation a difficult task. As a result, laws and regulations often stagnate, leading to the continued existence of obsolete rules and policies that serve long-forgotten purposes. Recognizing the...

This short paper explains why the value of nonpartisan staff in the legislative process may stem primarily from the staff's responsibilities to serve a broad group of legislators with heterogeneous interests, rather than on the “nonpartisan” nature of the staff. An earlier version of this...

Legislative drafting mistakes can upset statutory schemes. The Affordable Care Act was nearly undone by such mistakes. The recent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is rife with them. Traditional legal scholarship has examined whether courts should help resolve Congress's mistakes. But courts have remained...

This article reviews recent US proposals to amend the US Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) rules, also known as Subpart F. It places the US debate in a comparative perspective by describing how the US proposals fit in with developments in other countries that have CFC rules

This paper presents empirical evidence of a positive effect of council size on government spending using a data set of 2,056 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria over a period of 21 years. We apply a regression discontinuity design to avoid an endogeneity bias. In particular, we exploit...