Supporters of touch-screen voting claim it is a highly reliable voting technology, while a growing number of critics argue that paperless electronic voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. In this paper we use county-level data on voting technologies in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections...

We revisit the classic problem of tax competition in the context of federal nations, and derive a positive theory of partial decentralization. A capital poor median voter wants to use capital taxes to provide public goods. This results in redistributive public good provision. As a consequence,...

This paper analyzes the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the total provision of public goods in a framework in which consumers who may make such voluntary contributions to public goods via CSR are also voters who decide on the level of taxes to finance publicly provided public...

Empirical distributions of election margins are computing using data on U.S. Congressional and state legislator election returns. We present some of the first empirical calculations of the frequency of close elections, showing that one of every 100,000 votes cast in U.S. elections, and one of...

Host governments often display two types of behavior toward outside investors. At an initial stage they eagerly compete for production facilities by offering subsidy packages, but often reverse these policies at a later point. In contrast to the literature that explains the behavior as a result...

This paper considers a specific factor model with two sectors in which agents are altruistic towards domestic residents. I show that, even if the degree of altruism is small, direct democracy leads to commercial policies that are biased against trade as long as the mobile factor is unbiased in...

Among political practitioners, there is conventional wisdom about the outcomes of critical and salient legislative votes. 'This vote,' we hear, ' will either win by a little or lose by a lot.' Real-world examples suggest coalition leaders purchase 'hip-pocket' votes and "if you need me" pledges,...