A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

This paper investigates one of the most important financial issues arising from a secession or a country partitioning, namely the sharing ot the national public debt. Extending Dreze's distributive neutrlaity condition, we use the generational accounting technique and propose a dynamic...

There is a widespread concern that a greater mobility of individuals can undermine any attempt to redistribute income at the local level. In this paper we derive the equilibrium level of redistribution when both the rich and the poor are mobile (although in different degrees) and when each...

The lobbying process is modelled as an auction with externalities in which lobbies bid to get implemented thei most-prefered policy. Further more, the government may influence the lobbying process itself by biasing the auction among organized interests. We identify the following trade-off :...

This paper studies the formation of forest conservation policy when the government is influenced by an environmental lobby and an industrial lobby representing a non-competitive forest industry. Lobbying is modelled as a common agency game which is extended to allow for asymmetries in lobbying...

We study the degree of corruption in a hierarchical model of government. In particular, we explore the question of whether adding a layer of government simply increases the total amount of corruption or generates an organizational efficiency (via a principal-agent relationship between levels of...

A political constitution is like an incomplete contract : it spells out a procedure for making decisions and for delegating power, without specifying the contents of those decisions. This creates a problem : the appointed policy maker could use this power for his own benefit against the...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of decentralizing public good decision-making from a political and informational perspective. First, we explain why different levels of jurisdiction, central decision-maker and local ones, are likely to take their decisions under different informational...

Using the spatial theory of voting, this paper describes an institutional structure where there are two branches of the government: the executive, elected by plurality rule, and the legislative elected by proportional rule. The resulting policy outcome is described through a compromise between...

In this paper we show that in a simple spacital model where the government is chosen under strict proportional rule, if The outcome function is a linear combination of parties' positions, with coefficients equal to their share of seats, only a two-party voting equilibrium basically exists. The...