The United States Code (Code) is a document containing over 22 million words that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in various aspects of the Code. However, few have mathematically...

Despite evidence that modern democracies systematically shortchange public investment goods, relatively little theoretical work exists to explain this phenomenon. We build on Baron and Ferejohn's (American Political Science Review, 83(4) (1989) 1181--1206) bargaining model to describe public...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the allocation of the US federal budget to the states. We find that the president has a strong influence on the budget allocation, while support for theories that give prominence to the Congress is rather weak. Membership of prestige...

Transfer payments as a fraction of GNP in OECD countries vary from 30.4% in Belgium to 11.1% in Greece. We seek a political-economic explanation of this variation, as due to different preferences of national citizenries. Voters are modeled as caring about their personal welfare, the welfare of...

This paper develops and tests a Neoclassical growth model with the institution effect of government size in the framework of a dynamic panel data model, using two Generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators to address endogeneity of explanatory variables in estimation. I find a robust...

Americans have a love-hate relationship with government. Rejecting bureaucracy — but not the goods and services the welfare state provides — Americans are insisting government be made to run like a business. But, as Constitutional Coup shows, separating the state from its public servants,...