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The Political Agenda Effect and State Centralization

Acemoglu, Daron - 2016

We provide a potential explanation for the absence of, and unwillingness to create, centralized power in the hands of a national state based on the political agenda effect. State centralization induces citizens of different backgrounds, interests, regions or ethnicities to coordinate their...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012991695

Federal Lands, Opportunity Costs, and Bureaucratic Management

Libecap, Gary D. - 2018

The federal government owns and administers 472, 892,659 acres or 21% of the land area of the lower US, making it both the country's largest land owner and among the largest by a central government among western democracies. This condition is surprising, given that the US generally is viewed as...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012916622

Political Competition and Economic Performance : Theory and Evidence from the United States

Besley, Timothy; Persson, Torsten; Sturm, Daniel - 2021

One of the most cherished propositions in economics is that market competition by and large raises consumer welfare. But whether political competition has similarly virtuous consequences is far less discussed. This paper formulates a model to explain why political competition may enhance...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013227235

What Governments Maximize and Why : The View from Trade

Gawande, Kishore; Krishna, Pravin; Olarreaga, Marcelo - 2021

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some … governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously …, provides a valuable context in which the welfare mindedness of governments may be empirically evaluated. This paper …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013228755

Fractionalization

Alesina, Alberto; Easterly, William; Devleeschauwer, Arnaud - 2021

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013238939

Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?

Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James Alan; Torvik, Ragnar - 2011

Voters often dismantle constitutional checks and balances on the executive. If such checks and balances limit presidential abuses of power and rents, why do voters support their removal? We argue that by reducing politician rents, checks and balances also make it cheaper to bribe or influence...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013121590

Choosing Size of Government Under Ambiguity : Infrastructure Spending and Income Taxation

Manski, Charles F. - 2012

Attempting to shed light on the optimal size of government, economists have analyzed planning problems that specify a set of feasible taxation-spending policies and a social welfare function. The analysis characterizes the optimal policy choice of a planner who knows the welfare achieved by each...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013104080

Private Returns to Public Office

Fisman, Raymond - 2012

We study the wealth accumulation of Indian parliamentarians using public disclosures required of all candidates since 2003. Annual asset growth of winners is on average 3 to 6 percentage points higher than runners-up. By performing a within-constituency comparison where both runner-up and winner...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013106303

Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?

Cohen, Lauren - 2010

This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In doing so, we show that...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013146270

Property Rights and Parliament in Industrializing Britain

Bogart, Daniel E. - 2010

During Britain's industrialization, Parliament operated a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to exploit economic opportunities that could not be accommodated by the inflexible rights regime inherited from the past. In...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013148383