We examine the determinants of the EU budget expenditures allocation among different countries. Following previous literature, we consider two alternative explanations for the EU budget distribution: political power vs. 'needs view'. Taking the original data set (1976-2001) from Kauppi and...

This paper studies the link between the diffusion of news and spending decisions. We develop a canonical model that illustrates how the spread of information affects expenditures close to elections, conditional on the electoral rules. With the indirect election of the incumbent, news limits...

This paper provides a rationale for group support for political violence when violence does not provide a material bene–fit. A theory of fairness is adopted to demonstrate that although group violence may not be the equilibrium of a material game it may be a fairness equilibrium in a game...

Under evaluative voting, the voter freely grades each candidate on a numerical scale, with the winning candidate being determined by the sum of the grades they receive. This paper compares evaluative voting with the two-round system, reporting on an experiment, conducted during the 2012 French...

The impact of the fragmentation of executive and legislative bodies on the level and composition of government expenditure is a political feature that attracted considerable attention from economists. However, previous authors have abstracted from two important concepts : ideology and...

A central question in tort liability is how to induce a socially optimal level of precaution. In most analysis it is common to assume that litigation is either costless or the costs are exogenously fixed. Yet, in reality, litigation costs are large and litigants have the ability to choose their...

Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus provide characterizations of early Germanic (barbarian) society around, respectively, 50 BC and 50 AD. The earlier date corresponds to expansion of Rome to the Rhine and Danube. During the subsequent century Germanic governance institutions changed in a number...

This paper develops the first systematic attempt to model and empirically estimate the concept of optimal resource renting. Optimal rent is found to be positively affected by increases in the recession buffer and resource endowment, and negatively affected by the opportunity cost of hoarding....

This paper investigates how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects the competition intensity in a dynamic elimination contest. Theory predicts that the absolute level of investment costs has no effect on the competition intensity in homogeneous interactions. Relative cost...

Attorneys elected to the US House of Representatives and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law. This finding is based on the analysis of 54 votes at the federal...