This paper is a preliminary exploration of the politics of financial market development. Using panel data for 197 countries over 34 years, we test a range of variables and hypotheses regarding the politics of financial market development. We find only weak support for the legal origins...

Dictatorship has been one of the most persistent regime types in history. Different dictators have applied different strategies for obtaining political support in different societies. We discuss and empirically estimate the hypothesis that states that dictators rely more on military for...

The voter - bureaucrat is locked into a situation of a conflict of interests: as a conscientious citizen, he or she should support optimal expenditure levels for providing certain public goods, but as a person whose wellbeing and career depend on the volume of expenditures for providing public...

The paper identifies and analyzes the four main fault lines which will influence the next decades of global philanthropy. All are related to what we can refer to as "the market revolution in global philanthropy". As global philanthropy moves beyond grantmaking, into investment approaches that...

According to the contractarian perspective, a public good can be thought of as not so much a good that meets the technical neoclassical criteria of non-rivalness and non-excludability, but as one that is produced on a purely contractual basis, thus necessarily increasing the utility of all the...

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...

This paper presents the preface and first chapter of my book on James M. Buchanan, which should be out in late 2017, published by Lexington. This chapter introduces Buchanan to those who don't know him, or who know him only in terms of individual pieces of work they have encountered. I portray...

We study the performance of the Quadratic Voting (QV) mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl (2016) in finite populations of various sizes using three decreasingly analytic but increasingly precise methods with emphasis on examples calibrated to the 2008 gay marriage referendum in California....