This paper examines factors affecting the decision of whether or not to make certain harmful acts illegal. It considers factors related both to the cost of law enforcement and to the crime commission decision. On the enforcement side, illegality is limited by the existence of fixed notice and response costs, which are unrelated to the harm from the act, and also by costs of imposing punishment. In

Hunter-gatherer societies are characterized by decentralized decision making and shared access to resources. Goods are distributed via reciprocal exchange, sharing, and gift-giving, in the end resulting in relatively equal distribution. Work effort, however, is not distributed equally; the best hunters exert a disproportionate share of productive effort. We argue that these features of the hunter-gatherer

Corruption is an endemic societal problem with profound implications in the development of nations. In combating this issue, cross-national evidence supporting the effectiveness of the rule of law seems at odds with poorly realized outcomes from reforms inspired in the academic literature. This paper provides an explanation for such contradiction. By building a computational approach, we develop three

This paper develops a theory of the organization of high-end restaurants. I identify the high degree of output complexity produced by these establishments as the industry’s fundamental characteristic. This high degree of output complexity leads to reputational investments by restaurants, which in turn affects their organizational structure. In particular, my theory addresses the prevalence of chef-owned

More than half the population considers lack of security a significant national problem in Peru, and one in four citizens has reported being the victim of a crime. However, empirical evidence remains scarce and does not factor in the social cost of crime. To this end, this paper seeks to contribute by measuring the short-term and long-term impacts of crime victimization on trust in public institutions

This paper evaluates one potential impact of California’s Proposition 14, which created a top-two primary system for all non-Presidential election races within the state. Our analysis is twofold, with the concern of each analysis placed on voter roll off when the result of the top-two primary placed a non-traditional pairing of candidates on the ballot.We focus on U.S. House races using data at the

Ensuring compliance with the tax laws is an enduring challenge for all governments. However, the methods by which governments enforce the tax laws, and by which individuals and firms evade their taxes, change over time, due at least in part to changing technology. In this paper I examine how changing technology, especially changes driven by the transformation of information into digital formats for

Government behavior can be affected by natural resource benefits. Benevolent government and political leaders may use them to improve the welfare of the people, whereas others may use them for their own interests. To examine the effects of oil bonanza on government behavior comprehensively, this study investigates how giant oilfield discoveries affect the size and composition of government expenditure

While it is often pointed out that African countries have large government cabinets that underpin economic performance, lesser is known about the factors behind the size of government cabinets in Africa. Using an original database of the number of ministerial appointments in government offices in 35 African states, this paper establishes a robust negative relationship between the size of the government

This paper examines whether autocracy is a gamble. Using robust variance tests and other analyses, we find that long-term growth varies more across autocracies than across democracies. This remains true even when richer countries are excluded from the sample. We also investigate channels, to see if the higher variance of growth outcomes across autocracies can be traced to a higher variance in investment

How society should deal with the self-strengthening Tech Giants is a much-discussed issue. We suggest to democratize them by giving users a say in their decisions. With newly-developed collective decision rules and user councils, democratization of Tech Giants becomes feasible and complements, e.g., competition and basic data protection laws.

This paper investigates how a tax revenue allocation rule determines the level of environmental taxation influenced by interest groups. A model of special interest politics is modified to incorporate environmental taxation. Two groups of agents exist. The first group earns wage income, has negative utility derived from pollution generated by energy consumption, and earns a profit share of the energy

Despite some indications to the contrary, religion still plays an important role in contemporary society. In this paper, the association between religion and the quality of public goods and services, measured by the so-called “delivery quality” index of the Worldwide Governance Indicators project, is empirically investigated. Besides religion, different political regimes may also have a crucial impact

This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of the respective roles of different levels of government in expenditure functions, guided by recent theoretical developments on the political economy of partial expenditure decentralization. We adopt a theoretical framework in which the degree of expenditure decentralization is endogenous and depends, in equilibrium, on the relative political

Executive Directors of the International Monetary Fund elect the Fund’s Managing Director from a shortlist of three candidates; financial quotas of IMF members define the respective numbers of votes. The implied a priori distribution of success (preference satisfaction) is compared across different electoral procedures. The USA’s Executive Director can expect to come closer to its top preference under

Should democracies be rewarded and autocracies punished, or should it be the reverse? This is an important question for foreign policy makers who regularly find themselves wanting to alter the behavior of foreign governments favorable to their interests. Existing studies on economic sanctions and rewards provide an uneasy answer that sanctions are more effective toward democracies and rewards work

How does fractionalization affect political collaboration on reform? We develop a theory to explain observable variation in legislative output over time and policy areas. We show how the properties of a reform project determine the extent to which fractionalization affects political collaboration on reform. We apply our framework to the case of Lebanon and present mixed-methods evidence based on a

Rich economies are characterized by the coincidence of, on the one hand, high state capacity and, on the other, well-functioning markets and the rule of law. They have states that are powerful and centralized and yet also limited. Furthermore, relatively low rates of shadow economic activity and tax evasion suggest that citizens perceive their states’ limitations to be credible. This suggests that

The academic literature has long held that firms typically develop a system of incentives and rules that are meant to encourage employees to maximize their effort, and the firms’ profits. As a result, firms’ employees often rise through the ranks of the hierarchies in their firms through internal promotion, a process that results in the development of an internal labor market. This study explores the

Studies of the line item veto have traditionally focused on whether it leads to less spending than an all-or-nothing veto and have only produced modest results. However, other impacts that differences in rule choice might effectuate have not been investigated in detail. We examine the role of veto rules for budgetary volatility, the extent to which expenditures vary. Theoretically, we model budget

Different voting paradoxes identified by social choice theorists have rarely been documented in real-world elections. The collected data from the opinion polls in the 2017 Iranian presidential election provides substantial empirical evidence indicating that during the electoral campaigns, strong Borda paradox (the Condorcet loser wins plurality.) and weak Borda paradox (An alternative that is not the

The main focus of this paper is on the role of the past in budgetary policy and the impact of a multitude of relevant political characteristics on the local budget balance in a dynamic context. Although the importance of past policy was stated approximately 6 decades ago by Lindblom (Public Adm Rev 19(2):79–88, 1959), dynamic studies are relatively underexposed in recent literature on the budget balance

This article investigates patronage in the Second Italian Republic by considering patronage a fundamental device able to guarantee a party presence in the governance of public bodies. The study sheds light on a particular area of party patronage, namely political appointments concerning legislators; it analyzes the factors which could determine whether a member of Parliament will be appointed to a

This paper studies the effect of political participation on public spending at the local level in Brazil. In particular, we look at the phased-in implementation of electronic voting in the late 1990s—which enfranchised poorer voters by decreasing the number of invalid votes—to identify the causal effect of political participation on public spending. We build a theoretical political economy model which

We explore how crime victimization affects two of the main dimensions of social capital: trust and participation in social groups. Using a large database that includes many Latin American countries, we find that victimization lowers trust, especially in other people and the police. However, participation in social groups is increased as a result of this event. These findings suggest that the net effect

Adding a somewhat new dimension to the substantial body of research on factors driving cross-national corruption, this paper examines the effectiveness of dimensions of enforcement in reducing corruption. The main novelty lies in comparing the relative influences of latent enforcement (police, judicial, and prosecutorial employment) versus actual enforcement (conviction rates) and enforcing institutions

Using a simple asymmetric capital-tax competition model where the allocation of mobile capital is distorted in non-cooperative equilibrium, this paper analyzes the welfare impact of regional tax coordination on a range of possible tax rates (a combination of maximum and minimum capital taxes made by a subset of regions). Under the assumption that the ownership of immobile factors (e.g., business land)

Each year about 60 million people flee their home country and seek to cross into developed countries, thus urging the latter to develop different policy responses to face the growing concerns about how immigration may affect social order. We design a novel two-part public goods experiment with radical income asymmetry between groups to investigate how voting on (not) helping less-endowed others affects

The achievements reached by group members’ effort, which accompanies the possibility of members’ free-riding, affect the outcomes of competition among groups. In some cases, each achievement has the binary characteristic of “one or nothing.” For example, research groups face the challenge of making a scientific finding or not. The groups compete for a scientific breakthrough by making the related findings

There is extensive evidence on waste effects of environmental corruption in public works procurement. However, corruption is not the only source of waste. In this paper, we adopt a wider perspective and look at the environmental institutional quality, identifying the channels through which it can lead to different types of waste in public works execution. We firstly provide some empirical evidence

Local governments in the United States can file for bankruptcy to restructure their debt if allowed by state laws. While some states legislate an unconditional authorization, others conditionally permit local filings, do not give authorization, or intervene in local crises. This paper investigates the impact of state policy adoption on local governments’ revenue to expense ratio, a measure of deficit

This paper revisits the soft budget versus the hard budget constraint in federations. By extending Besfamille and Lockwood (Int Econ Rev 49:577–593, 2008), who examine a case where the soft budget is ex ante favorable, we consider a model that allows the federal government to use a matching grant as an ex post policy instrument. We establish that this instrument acts as a commitment device and may