The federal government is headed toward a financial crisis as a result of chronic overspending, large deficits, and huge future cost increases in Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare would be big fiscal challenges even if the rest of the government were lean and efficient,...

Social and/or political involvement within the population is often argued to enhance public sector performance. The underlying idea is that engagement fosters political awareness and interest and increases the public's monitoring ability. Still, although extensive voter involvement may put...

In this paper, I extend a theoretical model of the crowding out hypothesis, whereby government contributions to a public good displace private giving, in order to illustrate how dollar-for-dollar crowding out is possible even when individuals regard their own contributions and government grants...

Medicare expenditures as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) are now six times larger than they were in 1967. Forecasts for the next 75 years show that almost $1 of every $5 of GDP could be spent on Medicare. That is unaffordable. Without intervention, Medicare's share of GDP will force some...

This scoping paper examines the balance between investor protection and the right to regulate in investment treaties and investment treaty policy. It notes the growing trend to analyse the impact of particular treaty rules rather than treaties as a whole. It also points to the importance of...

In this paper I offer a novel interpretation of the challenges posed by ‘constitutional drift' — the tendency for de facto political procedures to alter when these procedures no longer are incentive-compatible for those wielding political power — for sound governance institutions, with...

There are several theoretical accounts of public sector outsourcing. We note that leading theories give different predictions of the influence of political variables and test the predictions on a Swedish data set in which outsourcing varies between municipalities and over time as well as between...

Russian Abstract: Данный текст является введением в книгу "Стратегия долгосрочного процветания: в поисках растаявшего ориентира". "Стратегия… " является продолжением и...

Murray Rothbard and other anarcho-capitalists would abolish all governments. Individuals instead would voluntarily subscribe to the services of one of a number of competing private protective associations. This vision is a pipe dream. Building on the ideas of small-government classical liberals...

Some politicians argue for the splitting and combining of states to increase government productivity, but there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the optimal size of a state. Using data from Indian states, I test a model of the optimal size of the state. I find that size and preference...