This note reviews two possible approaches to political economics scholarship - one concentrating on redistribution conflicts under the assumption of homogenous preferences and one focusing on preference heterogeneity and, among other issues, cultural specificty of agents. It discusses both...

In 2005, Uganda’ government fundamentally shifted the direction of its microfinance (MF) policy. Hitherto it had focused on integrating MF institutions into the financial sector, allowing them to take deposits. Since 2005, it focuses on savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs); with government...

Does increasing transparency improve fiscal policy behavior of local governments? One way this could take place is via Yardstick Competition between incumbents of neighboring municipalities. This paper contributes to the literature by introducing a simple model which employs probabilistic voting...

We study the effect of uncertainty about the greenhouse gas emissions arising from the production of biofuels on trade policy, in the presence of lobby groups and two policy instruments, trade policy and biofuels mandates. We show that in the presence of biofuels mandates it would be optimal...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

The Greek bail-out was highly controversial. An oft-heard assessment is that i) the bail-out was a mistake, ii) the political haggling over it was irrational and iii) the bail-out will create a moral hazard problem. Contrary to this view, our analysis suggests that, given EMU’s present...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique recent findings that democratic practices are positively related to homicide rates. Design/methodology/approach – Economic rational choice model supported by empirical evidence. Findings – It was found that higher homicide rates are only...

African states are often called corrupt indicating that the political system in Africa differs from the one prevalent in the economically advanced democracies. This however does not give us any insight into what makes corruption the ruling norm of African statehood. Thus we must turn to the...

We propose a positive formal framework for analyzing sovereign bail-outs in the context of the European Monetary Union (EMU) with a view to making policy recommendations regarding improvements to the EMU institutional architecture. We build our analysis on a political economic game-theoretic...