This paper provides the theoretical perspective and empirical support for congressional dominance of agency decisions. My thesis is twofold. First, because much of the previous evidence on this question is not evidence at all, many scholars' intuition and conclusions are based on a logically...

Professor Tullock has raised a central question in the confrontation between abstract models of PMR and majority rule as practiced in real institutions. We believe the decision making stability of real-world legislatures lies in the way these legislatures institutionalize majority rule....

In 1994, China began a profound reform of its state-owned enterprises (SOE). We first describe and characterize this progress in two areas: privatization of small state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the county level and mass lay-offs of excess state workers at the city level. Local governments...

March 1999 <p> Second generation theories of federalism extend traditional approaches by systematically studying the role of government incentives in economic performance. Providing government with the incentive to promote markets is especially acute for developing economies or those in transition...</p>

In the 1980s scholars began applying Positive Political Theory (PPT) to study public law. This chapter summarizes that body of research and its relationship to other schools of legal thought. Like Law and Economics, PPT of Law uses sequential game theory to examine how rules and procedures shape...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

Recent empirical studies by Persson and Tabellini show that, in parliamentary countries with proportional representation, government spending as a fraction of GDP goes up during cyclical downturns but does not come down during cyclical upturns, whereas this ratchet effect is not apparent in...