Most transitional economies in Central and Eastern Europe have rather surprisingly resisted protectionist pressures - at least during early stages of reform - and adopted liberal trade policies. In this paper the course of trade policy during transition is explained from a political economy...

This paper introduces a democratic voting process into an OLG economy in order to analyze the e ffects of a rising old-age dependency ratio on the composition of government spending and endogenous economic growth. Forward-looking agents vote each period on the public policy mix between...

In this work we simulate the effects of tax autonomy of the Austrian states on the levels of public employment in each state. We show that depending on the strength of the public sector lobby, tax autonomy would require reduction of employment in the public sector between 25% and 35% of the...

We develop a theory of political transitions inspired in part by the experiences of Western Europe and Latin America. Nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite. The initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening social unrest or revolution and this may force the...

Although pre-electoral political manipulation of the budget --- the political budget cycle (PBC) --- has been long investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing. There also exist ongoing debates over how the...

The present paper is part of unpublished book divided into three interrelated manuscripts that analyze the collapse of the Sudan. The theory introduced here is that the regime was built on kleptocratic framework. That enhanced a rapid transformation of the values' system of the country and...

This paper argues that migration could trigger institutional development in the sending country. It is shown that the existence of rent-seeking institutions not only hinders the adoption of a more efficient technology, it also reinforces itself; while the possibility of migrating to a more...

We use new annual data on gasoline taxes and corporate income taxes from U.S. states to analyze whether politicians avoid tax increases in election years. These data contain 3 useful attributes: (1) when state politicians enact tax laws, (2) when state politicians implement tax laws on consumers...

Despite much theoretical discussion the enforceability of constitutional constraints, the question has received little empirical attention. After discussing the theoretical arguments for and against the proposition that constitutions are capable of protecting individual liberty against...

Natural experiments are increasingly prominent in the social sciences. However, natural experiments often have more in common with traditional observational studies than with randomized experiments. We illustrate our argument by examining the case of using redistricting to estimate the personal...