We consider a singular event of the following form: in a simple voting game, a particular division of the voters resulted in a positive outcome. We propose a plausible measure that quantifies the causal contribution of any given voter to the outcome. This measure is based on a conceptual...

There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of direct democracy on redistribution has attracted much less attention....

Peer support workers - people with their own lived experience of mental illness - provide mutually supportive relationships in secondary mental health services. Increasing numbers are being employed, both in this country and elsewhere. But good quality evidence on the effectiveness of this form...

Unrealistic optimism is a well documented phenomenon. This paper argues that it is important in many economic contexts. Focusing on start-up finance for businesses, optimism may be responsible for or consistent with features such as credit rationing or redlining that are normally taken as...

We live in an urban age. Over half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, while the urban population is expected to reach 60% by 2030. At the same time, the importance of cities for national economic growth and climate change continues to increase. Three groups of cities will be...

This paper argues that there is nothing anomalous about the flypaper effect. I develop a simple median voter model of government spending with costly tax collection that predicts the flypaper effect and provide a quantifiable measure of its magnitude. Using the model insights and previous...

Background:- Policy and practice guidelines emphasize that responses to children and young people with poor mental health should be tailored to needs, but little is known about the impact on costs. We investigated variations in service-related public sector costs for a nationally representative...

The co-Director of Democratic Audit, Professor Patrick Dunleavy was asked by the leading Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Post, to write a report on the costs of transitioning to a new government in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote in Scotland’s independence referendum. The report argues that an...

We present a framework for the analysis of tax and benefit policy in countries with significant informality. Our framework allows us to jointly analyse the effects of various taxes and benefits on incentives for firms and workers to be informal and evade taxation. We find that payroll taxes and...