The ruler's power varied greatly in Islamic history over time and space. We explain these variations with a political economy approach to public finance, identifying factors affecting economic power and its constraints. An influential interest group capable of affecting the ruler's power was the...

State and religion, two of the oldest institutions known to mankind, have historically had a close relationship with each other, often joining forces to rule populations. Although the tendency towards secularization has hampered this relationship in recent centuries, the state-religion alliance...

There appear to be two seemingly contradictory images of law and economic change in the Islamic world. Whereas some scholars have viewed Islamic societies as rigid and incapable of adapting to a changing environment, others have held the opposite image of Islamic societies as flexible, quick to...

An expanding state has to decide how to tax the newly conquered lands, most likely taxed under a different regime. It can either preserve the prevailing system of taxation or change it to conform to its own system. The choice depends on the relative efficiency of the two systems, political...

This paper sheds new light on the determination of environmental policies in majoritarian federal electoral systems such as the U.S., and derives implications for the environmental federalism debate on whether the national or local government should have authority over environmental policies. In...

In this paper, we develop a simple model of the rights a government provides its citizenry. Rights are treated as public goods and taken as primitives in agents utility functions; each agent has preferences over the entire policy vector. We model the interaction among citi-zens and the...

This article tests the Protection for Sale (PFS) model using detailed data from U.S. food processing industries from 1978 to 1992 under alternative import demand specifications. All empirical results support the PFS model predictions and previous empirical work qualitatively. Although welfare...

A standard finding in the political economy of trade policy literature is that we should expect export-oriented industries to attract more assistance than import-competing industries. In reality, however, trade policy is heavily biased toward supporting import industries. This paper shows how...