We develop a theory of endogenous regimes transitions (with a focus on democratic consolidation), which emphasizes the role of political culture and of its interaction with political institutions. Political culture reflects the extent of individual commitment across citizens to defend democracy...

Dictatorship has been one of the most persistent regime types in history. Different dictators have applied different strategies for obtaining political support in different societies. We discuss and empirically estimate the hypothesis that states that dictators rely more on military for...

In addition to valuing whether a tax policy is equitable, efficient, and administrable, I argue we should ask if a tax policy is politically just. Others have made a similar case for valuing political justice as democracy in implementing just tax policy. I join that call and highlight why it...

We study the performance of the Quadratic Voting (QV) mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl (2016) in finite populations of various sizes using three decreasingly analytic but increasingly precise methods with emphasis on examples calibrated to the 2008 gay marriage referendum in California....

According to the neoclassical economic theory, common goods would be underproduced by the market in the absence of a monopoly of force capable of coercing every able member of society to contribute to their provision. By applying both the methodological tools developed by the Austrian School of...

In this paper, I attempt to provide a comprehensive demonstration that, contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing inherent in defense that makes it belong to the category of common goods, thus indicating that its effective provision does not require the existence of a territorial monopoly of...

In law as well as economics, the most well-known aspect of Coase's “The Problem of Social Cost,” is the Coase Theorem. Over the decades, that particular notion has morphed into a crucial component of Chicago law and economics — namely, transaction cost analysis. In this Article, I...

We construct a dynamic model to study the interaction between households' investment decisions, their voting strategies, and government's choice of fiscal policy. Our purposes are threefold. First, we provide a theory of the beneficial effects of political "gridlock". Second, we characterize an...

We empirically analyze the effect of political support for the government on voluntary tax compliance. To this end, we use 33 survey results of the contingent valuation (CV) method developed and widely used for the valuation of non-market goods in the field of environmental economics. The degree...