This paper uses data from the Gothenburg District Court in Sweden and a research design that exploits the random assignment of politically appointed jurors (termed nämndemän) to make three contributions to the literature on jury decision-making: (i) an assessment of whether systematic biases...

This paper uses a large panel of financial flow data from banks to assess how institutions affect international lending. First, employing a time varying composite institutional quality index in a fixed-effects framework, the paper shows that institutional improvements are followed by significant...

The internal market in Europe will greatly increase the international mobility of resources. How will this affect fiscal policy in different countries? We first consider taxation of capital in a two-country model, where a democratically-chosen government in each country chooses tax policy....

Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This Paper investigates the criteria that should lead a society to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non-elected bureaucrats. Politicians are preferable for tasks that do not involve too much specific...

Is inequality harmful for growth? We suggest that it is. In a society where distributional conflict is important, political decisions are likely to produce economic policies that allow private individuals to appropriate less of the returns to activities which promote growth, such as the...

Inspired by current European developments, we study equilibrium fiscal policy under alternative constitutional arrangements in a `federation' of countries. There are two levels of government: local and federal. Local policy redistributes across individuals and affects the probability of...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role played by domestic political incentives in the accumulation of large external debts by developing countries between 1972 and 1981. The theoretical model characterizes two equilibrium regimes. In one the borrower is on its...

We study the evolution of an educational system which is founded on a hierarchical differentiation between technical and general education, with a superior social status attached to general. The resulting dynamic political equilibrium is best summarized by the ratio of vocational to general...