Why do donor countries give foreign aid? The answers found in the literature are: <p> (i) because donor countries care for recipient countries (e.g. altruism), and/or (ii) <p> because there exist distortions that make the indirect gains from foreign aid (e.g. <p> terms of trade effects) to be larger than...</p></p></p>

This paper develops a political model to analyze the stability of income tax schedules. It isassumed that agents perceive any proposed alternative tax policy as more uncertain than thestatus quo. A tax policy is stable if it is a Condorcet winner. It is well known that in a modelwithout...

This paper revisits the fiscal "decentralization theorem", by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are benevolent, while retaining the assumption of policy uniformity. If instead, decisions are made by direct majority voting, (i) centralization can welfare-dominate...

The present paper seeks to explain the pattern of income redistribution in a globalised world of increased market income inequality and lower costs of factor mobility. In some countries, larger market income inequality has been met by an increased redistributive effort, thus keeping the...

This note studies the volatility of the policy chosen by a committee whose members’ preferences are volatile, due to common and individual preferences shocks. It is shown that majority voting mitigates the latter but not the former. The volatility of the policy is smaller the smaller the...

This paper analyzes an endogenous growth model where agents have different factor endowments and government finances public expenditure by imposing two flat-tax rates, one on capital income and one on labor income. The main finding is that, in the absence of lump-sum redistributions,...

This paper analyzes the provision of goods with consumption externalities (such as public policies) in hybrid settings: the `good' is provided in a democratic process by majority vote, but each individual agent is free to contribute additional amounts before or after the political decision has...

Adding majority voting to a simple new economic geography model, we analyse under which circumstances politically determined barriers to international firm relocation exist. Two countries, differing in market size, consider abolishing restrictions on firm mobility. Eliminating these restrictions...

We analyse the political determination of transportation costs in an analytically solvable core-periphery model. In a benchmark case with certainty about where agglomeration takes place, we find that a majority of voters prefers low trade costs and the resulting equilibrium is an industrialised...