This chapter gives a flavour of recent theoretical work on coalition formation and political parties. I survey recent work on both pre-election coalition formation and post election coalition (or government) formation. A number of alternative rationales for the formation of parties are compared...

This paper is the first of its kind to study quality of life responses of crime victims. Using cross-sectional data from the OHS97 survey of South Africa, we show that victims report significantly lower well-being than the non-victims, ceteris paribus. The calculated ‘compensating variation’...

This paper explores how to optimally set tax and transfers when taxation authorities : (1) are uninformed about individuals’ value of time in both market and non-market activities and (2) can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. We show that optimal...

This paper uses the approach of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2003) to propose seasonal unit root tests for dynamic heterogeneous panels based on the means of the individuals HEGY test statistics. The standardised t-bar and F-bar statistics are simply averages of the HEGY tests across groups. These...

This paper provides a simple theoretical framework for analyzing simultaneous vertical and horizontal competition in excise taxes, and estimates equations informed by the theory on a panel of US state and federal excise taxes on cigarettes and gasoline. We also examine the role played by...

The theoretical determinants of maximum sustainable government debt are investigated using Diamond's overlapping-generations model. A level of debt is defined to be 'sustainable' f a steady state with non-degenerate values of economic variables exists. We show that a maximum sustainable level of...

Does power sharing between competing elites result in franchise extension to non-elites? In this paper, we argue that competing, risk-averse elites will enfranchise non-elites as in-surance against future, uncertain imbalances in relative bargaining power. We show that negligibly small changes...

The object of this paper is to present an anatomy of the imbalanced development of Corby in the post-war period.The consequences of this imbalanced development, which caused a small Northamptonshire village to grow into a major steel town, are now reflected in the grim economic and social...

The main aim of this paper is to suggest a model which relates wage rates to the degree monopsony power in the labour market. Labour market monopsony power has received relatively little theoretical or empirical attention, yet there are a number of reasons for believing it may be a fairly...