This article proposes refined econometric estimates of effective marginal income tax rates for 23 OECD countries from 1951 to 1990. Panel regressions find such measures negatively correlated with economic growth. These results are consistent with endogenous growth theories and opposite to those...

We test the "war of attrition" models of fiscal performance on the sample of Italian governments from 1948 to 1994. We control for conditioning phenomena, like government stability, majority size, central bank independence, political budget cycle and external economic constraints, as well as for...

This paper tests the explanatory power of alternative theories on the determinants of judiciary independence using annual and decision-based data on the Italian Constitutional Court. The estimates show that structural measures of judiciary independence, such as the share of constitutional judges...

Empirical tests of the theories on the relationship between political competition and economic performance generate a puzzle: data tend to support the theory at the lower levels of government, but not in panels of countries. We argue that the larger set of policy instruments reduces the tax...

We investigate whether corporatist governance negatively affects growth: a) directly through higher transaction costs involved in the policy decision making process; b) indirectly, yielding growth retarding policy decisions. We construct a more accurate data set for 18 OECD countries in the...

This paper has two goals. 1) To evaluate the sustainability of Italian public deficits according to the methodology developed by Trehan and Walsh (1988, 1991) and Bohn (2004); 2) To analyze how the determinants of debt creation evolved in the years following the Maastricht Treaty and how this...