The empirical literature on the political economy of finance emphasizes the importance of political institutions as crucial determinants of financial development and shows that democratic regimes are positively and robustly correlated with financial development. By using a three years periodic...

Based on the theoretical background of the link between countries’ public sector transparency and environmental policy, our paper provides empirical evidence for a sample of 49 countries for the time period of 1995–2000. Assuming that countries’ environmental performance is a product of...

One of the most important challenges the European Union was facing at the beginning of the 21st century was to balance economic development with the improvement of quality of its citizens life. A new approach for assessing the quality of life using the ten-degree global scale is revealed in this...

We estimate a non-linear and discontinuous relationship between the tax level and the degree of alignment between the legislature and the governor, measured as the number of seats in the legislature that belong to the governor’s party. In the states with the line-item veto, there is a jump in...

We examine the relationship between sexual activities and happiness using a sample of 3800 adults from China. We establish some firm results about the contribution of sexual activities and relationships to happiness for an important country other than the United States. Our main finding is that...

We start out reviewing the justification for press subsidies. The social value of journalism can be larger than what the newspapers are able to extract because of knowledge externalities, public good characteristics of investigative journalism and nonappropriability of consumer surplus. A free...

The same methodology Oecd and Ecofin apply to project future trends of health care expenditue is here applied to reconstruct backwards Italian health care expenditure. The time horizon is 1988-2012. Results are described and argued. Important evidence emerges on the historical value of the...

The 'Easterlin Paradox' holds that economic growth in nations does not buy greater happiness for the average citizen. This thesis was advanced in the 1970s on the basis of the then available data on happiness in nations. Later data have disproved most of the empirical claims behind the thesis,...

We study the effect of electoral systems on openness to immigration. According to the literature, in our model plurality systems induce a rent-seeking policymaker to get re-election through locally provided public goods rather than through transfers, whereas the opposite occurs under...

This paper develops a model of centralized public spending where decision-makers are the regional median voters instead of the national median voter of the received literature. Regional representatives decide the level of public spending by bargaining in the central legislature. We study how...