Conventional wisdom suggests that compulsory voting lowers the influence of specialinterest groups and leads to policies that are better for less privileged citizens, who often abstain when voting is voluntary. To scrutinize this conventional wisdom, I study public goods provision and rents to...

We develop a dynamic model that can explain identity switching activities among a stereotyped population, such as passing and selective out-migration, based on the group reputation model developed in Kim and Loury (2008). The more talented members of the population, who gain more by separating...

The volume of theoretical literature seeking to explain public-debt accumulation has exploded in recent years as debt crises have emerged in many nations. However, empirical evaluation of political-economy theories has, unfortunately, lagged somewhat that of the standard...

When considering the implications for fiscal-policy outcomes (especially deficits and debts) of the dispersion of policymaking authority across multiple actors, recent veto-actor scholarship has emphasized its potential to privilege the status quo and thus retard policy-adjustment rates. In...

A major contribution of the public-choice school is the recognition by Gordon Tullock that contestable rents give rise to social losses because of unproductive resource use. Contestable rents usually are politically assigned privileges. Contestable rents can also be found outside of government...

We model an overlapping-generations economy with two skill levels: skilled and unskilled. The welfare-state is modeled simply by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner. Therefore, some (the unskilled workers and old retirees) are net beneficiaries...

Using a new data set on Swiss state and local governments from 1890 to today, we analyze how the adoption of proportional representation affects fiscal policy. We show that proportional systems shift spending toward broad goods (e.g. education and welfare benefits) but decrease spending on...