In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what mightcause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considersan environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of powerand distribution where institutions (the...

Public choice analysts have often argued that the level of government spending willreflect voter-taxpayer’s demand for public goods, while the fiscal illusion literature hasargued that certain features of the tax structure affect voter’s perceptions of their taxburden causing them to...

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public goodthat avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is in-creased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the...

We present a rigorous, yet elementary, demonstration of the existence of a uniqueLindahl equilibrium under the assumptions that characterize the standard n-player public goodmodel. Indeed, our approach, which exploits the aggregative structure of the public goodmodel, lends itself to a...

We examine whether an economy can have a bad (small or no formal sector, hightaxes) as well as a good (small or no informal sector, low taxes) equilibrium...

Modelling infrastructure as an international public good in a two-country modelof trade where each country’s social planner behaves strategically, we showthat the equilibrium levels of infrastructure are sub-optimal from a globalperspective...

Die politische Interessenvertretung von Unternehmen in Deutschland e-fährt insbesondere seit dem Regierungsumzug von Bonn nach Berlin im Jahr 1999 einen bedeutenden Wandel. Einige sprechen sogar von Berlinisierung (Alemann, 2000: 6). Dabei übernehmen vornehmlich Großunternehmen ihre...

This paper analyses how governance or institutional quality and tax morale affect the shadoweconomy, using an international country panel and also within country data...

The G20 summits in 2009 have proposed major changes in governance of the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF). Most important seems to be the acknowledgment that the IMF in itscurrent form lacks legitimacy and ownership. Accordingly, the G20 suggests a reallocation ofvoting shares to emerging and...

We propose a distinction between active waste and passive waste as determinantsof the cost of public services. Active waste entails utility for the publicdecision maker (as in the case of bribery) whereas passive waste does not (asin the case of inefficiency due to red tape). To assess the...