Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

This paper examines the long-run impact of ordinal rank during primary school on productivity using comprehensive English administrative data. Identification is obtained from variation in test score distributions across cohorts and subjects, such that the same score relative to the class mean...

To a very large extent, politics is agency. Indeed, agent-principal relationships pervade public and public-private behavior. This paper reviews the extensive but not yet integrated literature applying agency concepts to political settings. This includes agency in definitions of politics or...

Although macroeconomic forecasts are a relevant source of information for financial markets, the determinants of their accuracy are still unclear. We examine whether macro forecasting houses' access to private political information is a determinant of macroeconomic forecast accuracy. In...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g. pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the total...

We examine moonlighting by politicians in Germany. In July 2007, the German Supreme Court adjudicated that members of parliament (MPs) have to publish details of their outside earnings. Using panel data models, we investigate how outside earnings are correlated with absence and parliamentary...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

Persson and Tabellini (2003) show that presidential regimes and majoritarian election systems have important effects on fiscal policy, government effectiveness and productivity. Here, their dataset is extended in a number of ways: the number of countries included is increased from 85 to up to...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g., pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the...