As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

In this paper we model the commercial lobbying industry (such as the so-called K-Street lobbyists of Washington, D.C.). In contrast to classical special interest groups commercial lobbying firms are not directly motivated by policy outcomes. They exist to make profits by selling intermediaries...

We provide a solution to the free-rider problem in the provision of a public good. To this end we define a biased indirect contribution game which provides the efficient amount of the public good in non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. No confiscatory taxes or other means of coercion are used. We...

This paper experimentally investigates the effect of limits on campaign spending and outcome in an electoral contest where two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, compete for office in terms of the amount of campaign expenditure. The candidates are asymmetric only in that the incumbent...

This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics (brand equity), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms - either a wholesaling...

This paper provides a new explanation why several US states have implemented supermajority requirements for tax increases. We model a dynamic and stochastic OLG economy where individual preferences depend on age and change over time in a systematic way. In this setting, we show that the first...

This paper argues that, in the absence of a strong membership incentive within the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), a top-down institutional convergence of CIS countries towards European standards – i.e. democracy and market economy – is unlikely to be successful. However, due to...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...

Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of...

The theory of economic voting has extensively explored the influence of national economic conditions on votes for the incumbent party during elections. Such literature has never, however, explored the potential effects of economy on other types of voting swings in the sense of change in votes...