This paper analyzes simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education with three overlapping generations and productivity differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. The presence of productivity differences...

Empirical research on the determinants of right and left-wing extremist election successes is still dominated by descriptive statistical methods. The existing literature in political economy and political science mainly relies on interviews and survey results as well as on qualitative analyses...

The individual voting behavior on the abolishment of single income-tax exemptions crucially depends on how strongly agents are affected by other deduction possibilities that are not at stake in the reform plans of the government. The interactions depend (i) on the shape of the tax schedule, and...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding the priorities and the needs of different groups in the economy. This lack of knowledge opens the door for different groups to lobby the government in order to receive the government?s support. We set up a model of hierarchical contests and...

The article examines conditions, under which the degree of democratization influences environmental policy outcomes, with a given resource endowments' heterogeneity as a crucial feature of a politico-economic process. We develop an OLG model with pollution as an aggregate externality. The...

Political Economy may provide an important link between inequality and pollution. This paper studies the dynamic relationship between inequality and redistributive policy leading to differing transitional paths of pollution to the steady state, using a pollution-augmented framework developed by...

Using a considerable number of theoretical and empirical sources, we analyze the relationship between democracy and environment. First, we compare the situation in democracies and non-democracies. Later we discusses environmental distribution conflicts and the role of ratization influences...

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

This paper contributes to the ongoing methodological debate on context-free versus in-context presentation of experimental tasks. We report an experiment using the paradigm of a bribery experiment. In one condition, the task is presented in a typical bribery context, the other one uses abstract...

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...