Since the 2008 global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals...

This is a chapter of a book titled Law, Economics, and Morality, which proposes to integrate threshold deontological constraints (and options) with cost-benefit analysis, thus combining economic methodology with deontological morality. The chapter discusses the claim that even if moderate...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of political institutions in privatization. The empirical testing relies on a new political database with continuous and time-varying measures of the political-institutional setting, and of the partisan orientation of the executive. Using...

This paper studies the timing of privatization in 21 major developed economies in the 1977-2002 period. Duration analysis shows that political fragmentation plays a significant role in explaining government's decision to privatize: privatization is delayed longer in democracies characterized by...

Can the absence of freedom of speech, a monopolized media market, and a politicized education create obstacles which will stand in the way of economic growth? The answer is an unambiguous Yes, and substantially. Partial, biased, or heteronomous mass media and an education turned into a...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of political institutions in privatization. The empirical testing relies on a new political database with continuous and time-varying measures of the political-institutional setting, and of the partisan orientation of the executive. Using...

This article investigates the connection between the apparently uncorrelated issues of tax evasion and privatisation. We first determine how the political process - given a country's level of development and income distribution - will determine the efficiency of its tax system. We then regard...

Religious intensity as social insurance may explain why fiscal and social conservatives and fiscal and social liberals tend to come hand-in-hand. We find evidence that religious groups with greater within-group charitable giving are more against the welfare state and more socially conservative....

This article investigates the connection between the apparently uncorrelated issues of tax evasion and privatisation in a political economy framework. We first consider how the political process - given a country's level of development and income distribution - will affect the efficiency of the...