"Many believe that stricter campaign finance reform laws will improve the public's perception of the integrity of the election process and lessen their cynicism about politics. But will campaign finance reform change the public's attitudes towards our politics? The authors use a series of public...

We explore the link between bankruptcy laws and entrepreneurship in the U.S states. Using two measures of entrepreneurship capturing alternative conceptions of this phenomenon, we find that bankruptcy laws more favorable to debtors lead to increased levels of self-employment in some cases,...

This paper proposes a framework for studying the relationship between fiscal policy and state constitutions in terms of direct and indirect fiscal restraints and pressures. Fiscal restraints such as balanced budget rules limit the scope of government, while fiscal pressures such as education...

The United States faces severe fiscal challenges that can no longer be ignored. Entitlement spending, especially Medicare, is a ticking time bomb that must be defused. A growing debt burden raises concerns about the government's ability to pay back debt without strangling economic growth. These...

Alternative presentations of the same budget data tend to offer very different impressions, creating opportunities for a deeper understanding of fiscal health. However, these measures sometimes reflect hidden assumptions about government finances, so even a seemingly neutral way of presenting...

We introduce item response theory (IRT) to management and strategy research. IRT explicitly models firms’ and individuals’ observable actions in order to measure unobserved, latent characteristics. IRT models have helped researchers improve measures in numerous disciplines. To demonstrate...

Most political bargaining in the U.S. system has two features which are constitutionally mandated: (1) only one actor can make a formal proposal, and (2) he or she can make an indefinite number of proposals. Existing work in economics and political science ignores at least one of these features....