The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2016) report on the economic and fiscal effects of immigration included the first set of comprehensive fiscal impacts published in twenty years. The estimates highlight the pivotal role of the public goods assumption. If immigrants...

The impact of school resources on student outcomes was first raised in the 1960s and has been controversial since then. This issue enters into the decision making on school finance in both legislatures and the courts. The historical research found little consistent or systematic relationship of...

The budget forms the legal basis of government spending. If a budget is not in place at the beginning of the fiscal year, planning as well as current spending are jeopardized and government shutdown may result. This paper develops a continuous-time war-of-attrition model of budgeting in a...

As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

Economists recommend Pigouvian taxes as the most efficient way to fight climate change. Yet, carbon taxes are difficult to implement politically. To understand why, we study Washington State's two failed carbon tax referendums from 2016 and 2018—the first such votes in the United States. We...

A widely held view is that increasing globalisation and inequality are fostering support for populist actors. Surprisingly, when focusing on Germany and the U.S., populist voting is highest in less globalised regions with rather equal income distributions. Addressing this puzzle, I ask how the...

Using data on essentially every U.S. Supreme Court decision since 1946, we estimate a model of peer effects on the Court. We estimate the impact of justice ideology and justice votes on the votes of their peers. To identify the peer effects, we use two instruments that generate plausibly...

Current research argues that female politicians steer funding away from correction institutions toward other activities related to their policy preferences, such as health care, and that this diversion negatively affects the state spending on prisons. This paper shows that female politicians in...

We propose a theory of tax centralization and inter governmental grants in politico-economic equilibrium. The cost of taxation differs across levels of government because voters internalize general equilibrium effects at the central but not at the local level. This renders the degree of tax...