This paper analyses the impact of direct democracy, trust in government, the court and the legal system, and federalism on tax morale. In the tax compliance literature it is novel to analyse tax morale as dependent variable and to systematically analyse the effects of formal and informal...

The question to what extent governance structure affects people s well-being, here reflected in the decision to commit suicide, remains still largely unknown. This paper examines the effects of political institutions and governance structure on suicide using a balanced panel for 26 Swiss states...

This paper examines the factors determining vertical government structures. An empirical analysis for a panel of OECD countries indicates that apart from preferences, economies of scale, and other factors, institutions explain cross-national differences in the degree of fiscal decentralization....

In this study the impact of democratic and non-democratic regime (pre and post September 11, 2001seenarios) on foreign direct investment in Pakistan have been investigated using quarterly data over the period of 1976Q1 to 2006Q4. Stepwise regression, Box-Jenkins methodologies have been applied...

The paper investigates empirically the interaction between economic growth performance and political institutions in producing free-market reform. In particular, we explore whether political regime types systematically shape government policy responses to good or bad growth performance,...

We critically evaluate the empirical basis for the so-called resource curse and find that, despite the topic’s popularity in economics and political science research, this apparent paradox is a red herring. The most commonly used measure of ‘resource abundance’ can be more usefully...

We study changes in the form of government as an example of endogenously determined constitutions. For a sample of 202 countries over the period 1950-2006, we find that most changes are relatively small and roughly equally likely to be either in the direction of more parliamentarian or more...