This study investigates the empirical determinants of the treaty network of the 1860s and 1870s. It makes use of three central theories about the determinants of PTA formation, considering economic fundamentals from neoclassical and ‘new’ trade theory, political-economy variables, and...

We develop a model of the incentives faced by members of parliament (MPs) when deciding whether to engage in effort for their constituencies to assess the effects of their having a criminal background. Political representatives with criminal backgrounds are considered a great problem in many...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

Are grants to Swedish municipalities tactical? In this essay, I derive testable implications from a theoretical voting model and test these on a panel of 255 Swedish municipalities, 1981 - 1995. In order to decide which regions that are politically powerful, both election results, and survey...

A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

We present a dynamic theory of electoral competition to study the determinants of fiscal policy. In each period, two parties choose electoral platforms to maximize the expected number of elected representatives. The platforms include public expenditure, redistributive transfers, the tax rate and...

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the...

Immigration has become one of the most divisive political issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and several other Western countries. We estimate the impact of immigration on voting for far-left and far-right candidates in France, using panel data on presidential elections from...

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman "protection for sale" (PFS) model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occuring in response to import...