This paper studies the joint effect of fractionalization and inequality on the size of government. Within a political economy model of tax determination, I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience, so they care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own...

In democratic societies with skewed income distributions, simple political economy models predict that the poor will form a coalition to implement high taxes. I review this basic theory and some of its extensions. Then I discuss how we can test the model, and some common pitfalls, before I...

Non-linear relationships are common in economic theory, and such relationships are also frequently tested empirically. We argue that the usual test of non-linear relationships is flawed, and derive the appropriate test for a U shaped relationship. Our test gives the exact necessary and...

I study to what extent voters are forward looking and how future income affects <p> the voting decision. Particularly, I estimate the effect of both transitory and permanent income on preferences for different parties using a panel data set from the Norwegian Election Study. To construct a proxy...</p>

The time series nature of repeated surveys is seldom taken into account. The few studies that take this into account usually smooth the period-wise estimates without using the cross sectional information. This leads to inefficient estimation. I present a statistical model of repeated surveys and...

Political economy models predict that the rich oppose redistribution, and hence vote for conservative parties. Although this seems to fit the data well, I show that this is not true when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to what extent voting is...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

I study to what extent voters are forward looking and how future income affects the voting decision. Particularly, I estimate the effect of both transitory and permanent income on preferences for different parties using a panel data set from the Norwegian Election Study. To construct a proxy for...

Non-linear relationships are common in economic theory, and such relationships are also frequently tested empirically. We argue that the usual test of non-linear relationships is flawed, and derive the appropriate test for a U shaped relationship. Our test gives the exact necessary and...