This article is an attempt to synthetically present and test the main conclusions of the State-as-Leviathan model which was developed in a classical text The Power to Tax. Analytical Foundations of Fiscal Constitution (Buchanan, Brennan 1980). In the first part the main assumptions of the model...

The extant empirical evidence on the fiscal consequences of municipal mergers is ambiguous. We therefore revisit this question by making use of a merger reform in the German federal state of Brandenburg in 2003. In addition to identifying the causal effects of mergers on municipal expenditures...

This essay identifies the empirical facts about lobbying which are generally agreed upon in the literature. It then discusses challenges to empirical research in lobbying and provides examples of empirical methods that can be employed to overcome these challenges — with an emphasis on...

I provide a description of what I call the "bureaucratic reputation game", by defining the incentives of the relevant actors, their likely preferences, their available strategies, and how the playing out of such strategies produces organizational outputs. The main conclusions are twofold. First,...

While the United Nations and NGOs are pushing for global judicialization of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs), little is known of their consequences. We provide evidence of the effects of introducing three types of ESCRs into the Constitution: the rights to education, health and...

Private certification as a means of risk regulation and quality assurance offers advantages over government regulation, including superior technical expertise, better inspection and monitoring of regulated entities, increased responsiveness to consumers, and greater efficiency. This article...

This paper introduces a dataset that gathers information on whether and how Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have complied with or deviated from implemented fiscal rules. It provides annual data on fiscal rules for 14 LAC countries from 2000 to 2020, and it considers the design features of...

The objective of this research was to verify the effects of information quality and management support as critical contributors to the successful application of continuous auditing and continuous monitoring in the government sector. This study utilized survey research that was conducted in the...

Although there is valuable literature on areas of corruption, such as political and corporate corruption, a limited number of papers have examined the determinants of administrative corruption. To the best of our knowledge, the multivariate impacts of political instability and institutional...