Earlier studies have explained inter-country variations in the share of GNP devoted to military expenditures by international spillovers and by differences in the threat of attack related to relative incomes. In this paper, we use the theory of public choice to explain these differences. We...

This paper has attempted to explain variations among countries in the tax level, in the importance of progressive taxes and transfers, and in the after-tax share of middle-income groups. Particular attention was paid to the declines in each of these variables which are observable in...

Three commonly used measures of the impact of public spending yield conflicting results: one suggests that the public sector should be small, another that it should be large, and the third that it does not matter. Here, we avoid the problems of each approach by formulating a model in which the...

Previous models of public spending fail to explain why high inflation rates are distributed non-randomly across countries. In the switching-regime specification proposed here, governments tend to resort to inflationary debt monetarization when the spending level chosen by voters exceeds actual...