Voters often dismantle constitutional checks and balances on the executive. If such checks and balances limit presidential abuses of power and rents, why do voters support their removal? We argue that by reducing politician rents, checks and balances also make it cheaper to bribe or influence...

Can elites with access to governing institutions be constitutionally constrained? Effective constitutional constraints must be self-enforcing. This represents a substantial barrier to economic development, especially when elites control governing institutions. This paper analyzes how late Middle...

This chapter reviews the existing empirical evidence on how social insurance affects health. Social insurance encompasses programs primarily designed to insure against health risks, such as health insurance, sick leave insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance and disability...

Previous empirical studies analysing the effect of electoral systems on growth lack unanimous answers as they miss-specify mixed systems in the empirical setting, that is, they neglect to consider the proportionality degree of mixed electoral systems. This work supplies the missing answers by...

We compare single ballot vs dual ballot elections under plurality rule, assuming sincere voting and allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under the dual ballot, the number of parties is larger but the influence of extremists voters on equilibrium policy is smaller, because their...

Although the application of the conceptual and analytical framework of economics to the study of populism is still in its infancy, great advances have been made in recent years. This paper reviews some key contributions behind this progress. When analyzing populism, economists face two...