We investigate the relationship between economic freedom and corruption using data from U.S. states covering almost a quarter of a century. Our study advances the existing literature on several fronts. First, instead of using subjective cross-country corruption indices assembled by various...

The benefits and costs of government suggest an efficient government size. We investigate efficient government size by analyzing the relation between public spending and real GDP for France in the period 1896–2008. The results show a co-integration nonlinear relationship. Our time-series data...

Why do some countries in Latin America redistribute too much (“left-wing populism”), while others allow high levels of inequality to persist or even increase over time (“neo-liberalism”)? We argue that when a group's political influence is increasing in its wealth, there is a strategic...

This paper examines the influence of government ideology, political institutions and globalization on the choice of exchange rate regime via panel multinomial logit approach using annual data over the period of 1974–2004 in a panel of 180 countries: 26 developed and 154 developing.

We apply a standard specification of the causes of corruption to a large sample of countries to investigate the effect of internet awareness about corruption on prevalence and perceptions of corruption. The main hypothesis is that greater corruption awareness acts as a corruption deterrent. A...

Despite extensive empirical research, there is little agreement on how and why political regimes affect social and economic development. This paper expands on this literature by examining how political regimes affect health policies relating to the treatment of HIV/AIDS. The paper examines...

This paper analyses the impact of the political environment on the value of artistic outcomes as measured by the price of paintings produced over the period from 1820 to 2007. The analysis is based on a unique dataset encompassing a global sample of 273 superstars of modern art born between 1800...

This paper investigates the importance of political ideology for the choice of the tax structure. In particular, we examine the effects of cabinet ideology on the distribution of the tax burden across factors of production and consumption for 16 OECD countries over the period 1970–2000 by...

This study presents a simple empirical framework suitable for describing individuals' subjective evaluations of wage inequality and their normative assessment of market justice. The framework is illustrated using survey data from the International Social Survey Program from Switzerland. Although...

Some past theoretical models have predicted that bribes paid by firms to government officials are greater under a decentralized bureaucracy where a firm faces numerous officials. A “tragedy of the commons” arises where officials set bribe payments too high and so drive firms out of the...