We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest—which we call a ‘tax lottery’—can...

This paper refers to the ranking of densities that describe the distribution of an attribute in a given set of populations. The key elements of the problem are: (i) The distributions refer to ordered categorical data (e.g. health statuses, educational achievements, prestige positions,...

This essay deals with democracy promotion & protection by established democracies. It first describes how the dynamics and understanding of regime transitions changes from the first to the present fourth wave of democratization. Subsequently, it defines democracy promotion & protection and...

Despite criticism of the elite-centered model of "transitions to democracy", the mechanism by which collective actors influence paths of democratization remains unspecified. In this paper I argue that demands by collective actors mobilizing popular support can introduce issues and limit the...

The paper developed a political economy model about endogenous trade policy along the lines of the well known contribution of Grossman and Helpman (1994). In our case the structure of the economy is standard (neoclassical trade model instead of the specific factor trade model of the original...

We investigate the effects of religion on charitable contributions of Muslims who are in a minority to non-Muslims who are in a majority and to fellow Muslims. We find that religious thinking leads to significantly more charitable giving by 10%. The effect of religious thinking is dependent on...

Property rights are essential to economic development but vary with the political environment. We develop and test the claim that government partisanship influences the security of business firms’ property rights: the perceived security of property rights increases when right-wing parties take...

We experimentally investigate the nature of cooperation in various repeated games, with subjects from Romania and USA. We find stark cross-country differences in the propensity to sustain multilateral cooperation through bilateral rewards and punishments. U.S. groups perform well because...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

The article analyzes the relationship between government policies and social capital development. Policies that promote capital flows and domestic capital development, human development, and gross domestic capital formation positively influence social capital, while those that contribute to...