This paper analyzes simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education with three overlapping generations and productivity differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. The presence of productivity differences...

Empirical research on the determinants of right and left-wing extremist election successes is still dominated by descriptive statistical methods. The existing literature in political economy and political science mainly relies on interviews and survey results as well as on qualitative analyses...

In their seminal paper, Harrington and Hess (1996) discuss a model where candidates differ along two dimensions - ideology which is modeled by the standard Hotelling-Downs formulation and valence factors which encompass traits which all voters agree as desirable. While valence factor is given,...

Recent studies have claimed that states with initiatives systems of legislation use this more direct from of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a...

I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a nonbinding sharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. In a baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a voting treatment, subjects are first placed behind a 'veil of ignorance' and vote on the...

Using panel data for 188 countries over the period 1970-2002 this paper empirically analyzes the influence of the IMF and the World Bank on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. Countries receiving adjustment programs and larger non-concessional loans from the World Bank vote more...

Many political commentators diagnose an increasing polarization of the U.S. electorate into two opposing camps. However, in standard spatial voting models, changes in the political preference distribution are irrelevant as long as the position of the median voter does not change. We show that...

In an overlapping generations model with two social classes, rich and poor, parents of the different social classes vote on two issues: redistributive policies for them and education investments for their kids. Public education is the engine for growth through its effect on human capital; but it...

We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a region comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighboring district, there is underprovision of public goods in both the city and...