This paper provides novel evidence that corporate political influence operates through renegotiations of existing government contracts. Using detailed data on contractual terms and renegotiations around sudden deaths and resignations of local politicians, the estimates show that politically...

We study the efficiency and distributional consequences of establishing and abolishing the draft in a dynamic model with overlapping generations, taking into account endogenous human capital formation as well as government budget constraints. The introduction of the draft initially benefits the...

This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...

International organizations promote privatization as precondition for economic development. But is there really too little privatization? This political economy model asks for the incentives of governments to privatize or restructure a state-owned firm. Different government types are compared to...

Traditional political economy has paid primary attention to the structuring of the principal-agent relationship between citizens and politicians and the role of competition and institutions in disciplining political agents. However, as the electoral control of politicians and the credibility of...

We often use delegation as a commitment device if a government faces problems of timeinconsistency. McCallum (1995, AER P&P) challenged this practice, claiming that delegation merely relocates the commitment problem but does not solve it. In a model where delegation and specific policies are...

This paper investigates the association between corruption and political power, using individual level data on political corruption cases tried in France during the period 1980-2006. We test the hypothesis that corruption conviction and severity of punishment are negatively associated with...

We study the interaction between competitive markets that produce unequally distributed welfare gains and elections through which the poor majority can redistribute income away from the rich minority. In our simple laboratory democracy, subjects first earn their income by trading in a double...

This article reflects the renewed interest of economics and the social science discipline in value systems and religion. The World Values Survey provided a data framework of global value change, whose quantitative results led members of the economic profession, most notably, Barro, 2004 to...