The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits....

Empirical research of political business cycles (PBCs) may suffer from endogeneity bias when incumbent governments have discretion to call for an early election. Using an instrumental variable (IV) routine on data from Japan and the U. K., we find strong evidence to support the notion that...

Charles A. Beard ([1913] 2004) argued that the U.S. Constitution was created to advance the personalty interests of many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Because delegate votes on individual clauses at the Constitutional Convention were not publicly recorded, prior empirical...

Mancur Olson wrote important books in the area of Collective Choice and is considered one of the founding fathers of Public Choice as a field of economics. The chapters in this volume cover three main areas of Olson's life work: Collective Action, Institutional Sclerosis and Market-Augmenting...

Foreign aid is often granted to encourage market-oriented reform. It is not clear that this approach to reform has been effective. We seek to understand this seeming failure of aid. We ask whether and how political markets for institutions have influenced the impact of aid allocations on reform,...