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...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for the majority?s preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis by matching voting behavior on legislative proposals...

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...

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...

Spanish Abstract: En el presente trabajo se observa una propuesta de vinculación basado en el modelo de la triple hélice, este esfuerzo nace como resultado del ejercicio de planeación estratégica en la Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL), para realizar esta propuesta se investigaron...

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...