Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual's...

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....

The construction industry is important for Chinese rural to urban migrants. Over 90% of urban construction workers are rural migrants, and over a third of all rural migrants work in construction. The construction industry is not only particularly important, but is also different from other...

This paper asks whether the policies and programmes enacted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK will compete with other goals of public policy, in particular social policy goals. The Climate Change Act 2008 has set the UK some of the most demanding targets in the world: to reduce GHG...

This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors - education, health, personal social services, housing, and income maintenance and social security - are examined over three time...

One of the most striking institutional features of many less developed countries is that their militaries are closely involved in policy-making, potentially having a large impact on economic outcomes. This paper examines the role of the military in setting policy. For this purpose it develops...

Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the electorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion. We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by...

We model the coordination of specialised tasks inside an organisation as quot;attribute matchingquot;. Using this method, we compare the performance of organisational forms (M-form and U-form) in implementing changes such as innovation and reform. In our framework, organisational forms affect...

Bewley's condition on production sets, imposed to ensure the existence of an equilibrium price density when L? is the commodity space, is weakened to allow applications to continuous-time problems, and especially to peak-load pricing when the users' utility and production function are Mackey...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the social-welfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...