Paul Krugman has written a very timely paper. It discusses an old issue, that has become very relevant again. My comments address two questions. First, should inflation targeting be reconsidered? Here my answer is a clear and resounding yes. Inflation targeting performed very well in the fight...

Dati gli ampi divari di basi imponibili esistenti tra le regioni italiane, è necessario che il decentramento fiscale sia accompagnato da un sistema di perequazione a favore delle regioni più povere. Il dibattito italiano sul "federalismo fiscale" condivide questa necessità, ma non discute in...

To the layman, the upward trend in European unemployment is related to the slowdown in economic growth. We argue that the layman's view is correct. The increase in European unemployment and the slowdown in economic growth are related, because they stem from a common cause: an excessively high...

Over the last millennium, the clan and the city have been the locus of cooperation in China and Europe respectively. This paper examines - analytically, historically,and empirically - the cultural, social, and institutional co-evolution that led to this bifurcation. We highlight that groups with...

How to sustain cooperation is a key challenge for any society. Different social organizations have evolved in the course of history to cope with this challenge by relying on different combinations of external (formal and informal) enforcement institutions and intrinsic motivation. Some societies...

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...

This paper uses the common agency approach to analyze the joint determination of product and labor market distortions in a small open economy. Capital owners and union members lobby the government on both tariffs and minimum wages, while other factors of production are not organized. The paper...

This paper studies optimal redistribution among two different regions in a federal state. Regional governments supply local public goods financed with distorting local taxes. They have better information on their tax bases than the federal government. We model this both as an adverse selection...

We investigate the effect of electoral rules and political regimes on fiscal policy outcomes in a panel of 61 democracies from 1960 and onwards. In presidential regimes, the size of government is smaller and less responsive to income shocks, compared to parliamentary regimes. Under majoritarian...

Do fiscal policy variables — overall spending, revenue, deficits and welfare-state spending — display systematic patterns in the vicinity of elections? And do such electoral cycles differ among political systems? We investigate these questions in a data set encompassing sixty democracies...