This paper presents a two-party model of fiscal and debt policy which; (i) explicitly models the partisan, stabilisation, and (to some extent) survival motives of politicians; (ii) has predictions that are largely consistent with existing empirical findings about partisan and electoral effects...

This paper studies the Hart-Grossmn-Moore property rights approach to the theory of the firm, under the alternative assumption that bargaining over gains from trade is modelled strategically, rather than axiomatically. With strategic bargaining, the disagreement payoffs (payoffs to the two...

A simple folk theorem of repeated games states that Pareto-efficient outcomes can be achieved in a perfect equilibrium where deviations are punished by a reversion to Nash equilibrium of the associated stage game (Nash threats equilibrium), provided that players are sufficiently patient. In a...

We re-examine, from a political economy perspective, the standard view that higher capital mobility results in lower capital taxes - a view, in fact, that is not confirmed by the available empirical evidence. We show that when a small economy is opened to capital mobility, the change of...

Has the VAT proved, as its proponents claim, an especially effective form of taxation? To address this, this paper first shows that a tax innovation-such as the introduction of a VAT- reduces the marginal cost of public funds if and only if it also leads an optimizing government to increase the...

This paper studies whether exchange controls, particularly on the capital account, affect the choice of corporate tax rates, using a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1983-99. It builds on existing literature by (1) using a unique dataset with several different measures of the corporate...

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between an incumbent officeholder and the electorate, where the officeholder is initially uninformed about her ability. If officeholder effort and ability interact in the ""production function"" that determines performance in office,...