This article examines whether the judges of the French Constitutional Court demonstrated partisanship when ruling on the validity of the elections to the lower house of the French Parliament between 1958 and 2005. It uses a new dataset on the decisions of the Constitutional Court which takes...

Dieses Papier untersucht, ob die Festlegung der durchschnittlichen Steuerbelastung deutscher Spitzenverdiener zwischen 1958 und 2011 von der Zusammensetzung der Bundesregierung in Form von Verbindungen zur nationalen (akademischen) Elite und dem Unternehmensnetzwerk beeinflusst wird. Die...

The US Supreme Court has the power of certiorari. It may pick its fights. As a beneficial side effect, the court may allocate its resources, in particular the time and energy the justices spend on a case, to worthy causes. In economic parlance, this discretion makes the court more efficient....

The US Supreme Court has the power of certiorari. It may pick its fights. As a beneficial side effect, the court may allocate its resources, in particular the time and energy the justices spend on a case, to worthy causes. In economic parlance, this discretion makes the court more efficient....

The literature has identified that countries with higher levels of openness tend to present a larger government sector as a way to reduce the risks to the economy that openness entails. This paper argues that there are a number of policies that can mitigate trade-induced risks, many of which do...

There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance...

What explains cross-national differences in the fiscal impact of government, including the size of the welfare state? Standard explanations center on citizen and government ideology and ethnic heterogeneity, with a smaller role for institutions such as majoritarianism, presidentialism, and...

In addition to valuing whether a tax policy is equitable, efficient, and administrable, I argue we should ask if a tax policy is politically just. Others have made a similar case for valuing political justice as democracy in implementing just tax policy. I join that call and highlight why it...

Taxation involves the compulsory transfer of resources among members of society. Tax policy is concerned with how societies carry out taxation. That is a technical and legal question, but it is inescapably a political, social, and cultural one as well. To study tax policy is to engage...