Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of...

Das Papier diskutiert die Ausgestaltung des EU Finanzsystems aus polit-ökonomischer Perspektive. Die jetzige Form der Umverteilung lässt sich aus ökonomischer Sicht nicht nachvollziehen; vielmehr kann dies als ein System von politischen Seitenzahlungen verstanden werden. Es wird argumentiert,...

Politicians within any given party generally exhibit a degree similarity in terms of (political) viewpoints. Moreover, they are often constrained to follow general party lines on certain policy issues. Finally, they may be more likely to mimic one another than politicians from another party....

Consider a committee that in the past has made a promise not to confiscate the profits from a foreign investor. After the investment has taken place, there is a material benefit if the committee decides to default on the earlier promise. But there are also some small moral costs for those who...

We use a large and unexplored dataset covering all mainland Portuguese municipalities from 1979 to 2001 to evaluate the impact of political forces in the allocation of grants from the central government to local authorities. Empirical results clearly show that, besides variables that proxy the...

Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of...

In rural areas, small and medium-sized municipalities are challenged by demographic change and intensified competition for capital and high-skilled labor. Inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is often regarded as a significant element of a strategy to meet these challenges. Based on a survey in...

Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local...

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators’ birth towns receive larger transfers per...

In the present paper we analyse for the first time as far as we know, the ancient Greek regional proto-federations, of free-democratic city-states. We examine their political institutions and policies, like common defense and external policy, military organization, representative federal bodies...