The U.S. economy is growing more slowly than it can and should be growing because it does not invest enough in infrastructure, science, and education. There is an important procedural obstacle to funding public investments — a process of scoring the economic effect of legislation. This process...

This paper develops a political-economy model of the budget process focusing on the common pool problem of the public budget. We show that the externality arising from the fact that public spending tends to be targeted at individual groups in society while the tax burden is widely dispersed...

Public choice theorists generally assume that bureaucrats seek to maximize their own utility functions, subject to externally imposed constraints. Changes in constraint values may, therefore, be expected to result in predictable changes in the behavior of most organizations, not just businesses....

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) involve the supply by the private sector of infrastructure and services deriving from infrastructure assets which have traditionally been supplied by the public sector. PPPs are spreading all over the world. It may be quite plausible that such arrangements were...

WHAT IS the most immediate tool of empowerment you can provide a person? Ask an economist. Or ask a laborer who has been moved to the outskirts of the city as a part of the quot;big-progressive resettlement schemequot;. Or ask a student. The most likely answer you will get is:...

We examine how diversification of projects assigned to an agency can enhance efficiency by informing a principal of the agency's quality. Projects that appear inefficient in isolation may be justified when assigned to the same agency. Assigning different tasks to different special purpose...

In this paper I develop a simple dynamic agency model postulating that, among budgetary institutions, transparency of the budgeting process is the main driving force in explaining differences in fiscal outcomes and that budgetary numeric rules can be an active long-run constraint only if the...

Unanimous voting as the fundamental procedural source of political legitimacy grants veto power to each individual. We present an axiomatic characterization of a class of bidding processes to spell out the underlying egalitarian values for collective projects of a "productive state". At heart of...

Fiscal restraints have been argued to force today's governments to internalize the externalities that result from extensive borrowing on future electorates and governments as well as on other countries by causing fiscal instability. In this article we provide an alternative argument for fiscal...