Politicians have multiple principals. We investigate the weights that politicians put on the revealed preferences of their constituents, special interest groups and party when deciding on legislative proposals. Preferences of constituents, special interest groups and parties are directly...

In modern economics, preferences are the unmoved movers of economic and social behavior. They are taken as given such that all social phenomena need to be explained by changes in beliefs or constraints. The assumption of given preferences constitutes however merely a convenient assumption that...

We study theoretically and empirically how monetary incentives and information about others' behavior affects dishonesty. We ran a laboratory experiment with 560 participants inspired by the "observed game" developed by Kajackaite and Gneezy (2017). We find that the extensive (the fraction of...

We consider a model of redistributive politics in which politicians have the possibility to raise some debt and to implement a pie-increasing reform, i.e. a reform creating a net increase in the total taxable endowment. The reform benefits occur in the future and the reform costs have to be paid...

We use a large and unexplored dataset covering all mainland Portuguese municipalities from 1979 to 2001 to evaluate the impact of political forces in the allocation of grants from the central government to local authorities. Empirical results clearly show that, besides variables that proxy the...

The political article tests for rational political business cycles models on an unexplored and large data set of Portuguese municipalities. This data allows for a clean test of the models due to its high level of detail on expenditure items, an exogenous fixed election schedule and the...

Recently, the channels of citizen participation in Germany with regard to governmental processes are subject to change. Classical interaction between politicians and citizens still takes place. However, there are new tools for participation at hand as well. One interesting channel that attracted...

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...