Theory provides many explanations about the influence of electoral rules on politicians’ equilibrium behavior. With a few exceptions, all models agree that majoritarian elections are associated with more targeted redistribution and lower politicians’ rents than proportional representation....

Domiciliary public utility services in Colombia have a cross subsidy system which charges subsidized rates to the households who live in houses located in strata associated to low wealth levels, and taxed rates to the better off. We assesses the hypothesis that the flow of subsidies that...

In this paper we analyze class size effects in the case of primary schools in Poland. We use two empirical strategies to avoid endogeneity bias. First, we use average class size in a grade as an instrumental variable for actual class size. This allows us to control for within school selection of...

In Sweden, children typically start compulsary school the year they turn seven. Individuals born just before or just after the new year, have about the same date of birth but start school att different ages. We exploit this source of exogenous variation, to identify the effects of age at school...

This presidential address assesses the crisis of the Downsian model of political competition in light of the mounting evidence on policy divergence and evaluates the possibility that the new theories of politicians’ quality and political selection provide an alternative theoretical...