This paper contains an investigation of the effects of different means of financing government spending on economic growth, inflation, and welfare. In this setting, two different types of government spending are considered: productive expenditures which provide services to the private sector in...

As a result of monetary stabilization in Ukraine, inflation dropped from over 10,000 percent per annum in 1993 to around 40 percent per annum in 1996. Concurrently, the level of seignorage, or inflation tax revenue, dropped from 13 percent of gross domestic output to around 1 percent of output....

Over the past decade, a considerable amount of research has been conducted on the relationship between "public capital" or "infrastructure capital" and economic performance. Since the initial work of Aschauer (1989), researchers have used a variety of data sets of investigate an even wider...

First, there is the question of whether a permanent increase in public investment induces a permanent, or merely a temporary, increase in economic growth. The traditional neoclassical growth model of Solow (1956) predicts that any positive effect of an increase in the national savings and...

The paper uses the 1992 household survey for Bulgaria to show poor revenue performance of the income tax structure prevailing in 1992, which did not take into account the underlying distribution of income. The paper shows that Bulgaria can benefit from a much lower and simpler income tax rate...

We model the agenda formation process as a network. In an agenda network, nodes represent agendas while arcs represent coalition preferences over agendas and coalitional moves from one agenda to another. We show that all agenda networks have agenda nodes which are farsightedly consistent. These...

Consider a government that adopts a program, sees a noisy signal about its success, and decides whether to continue the program. Suppose further that the success of a program is greater if people think it will be continued. This paper considers the optimal decision rule for continuing the...

The self-interested ruler will not name a successor. Instead, he will prefer to rely on a tacit rule of succession, in which longevity confers legitimacy. [JEL D72, D81]

This paper analyses the determinants of happiness in seven Eastern European transition countries during the early phase of economic transition. The analysis of representative survey data in an ordered logit model shows that those core socio-demographic and economic variables known to be relevant...

This paper investigates the relationship between a bureaucracy and mass media industry, and its implications to corruption. We develop a bureaucratic model of corruption with mass media. A representative profit maximizing media firm seeks for corruption news to be printed and sold. Channels...