The phenomenon of municipal capitalism, which characterizes many local governments in Italy and Europe has been subject to many studies, but none have tried to model what this could imply for the choice of the optimal regulatory rule, nor for the vertical allocation of regulatory tasks among the...

We study the effect of electoral systems on openness to immigration. According to the literature, in our model plurality systems induce a rent-seeking policymaker to get re-election through locally provided public goods rather than through transfers, whereas the opposite occurs under...

We offer a policy basis for interpreting, justifying, and designing (3,3)-political rules, a large class of collective rules analogous to those governing the selection of papers in peer-reviewed journals, where each referee chooses to accept, reject, or invite a resubmission of a paper, and an...

This short paper aims to find an empirical evidence that al Qaeda behaves as a contest organizer rewarding an indivisible prize – namely, official membership and economic rewards – to candidate extremists groups. Would-be terrorists must then compete with each other to prove their commitment...

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive one disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and...

This paper presents evidence of ballot order effects in Irish General Elections, where candidates are listed in alphabetical order. Data relating to elections from 1977 to 2011 suggest the effect is significant in a statistical sense and in magnitude. The nature of the Irish electoral system...

We investigate the possible interaction effects that the extent of property rights protection and separation of powers in a political system have on economic growth. Using analysis of panel data from more than countries over the period 1970-2010 we find that the growth effects of property rights...