This article attempts to bring consumption into the study of redistributive politics. Analyzing data from 20 OECD countries over the period 1995-2007, I investigate whether factors that allowed lower and middle-income households to sustain their consumption had any impact on governments'...

In a world of high capital mobility, governments may be tempted to undercut each other's capital income taxes to attract capital from abroad. Since such tax competition may have detrimental effects for all countries, European policy makers have debated the introduction of a minimum capital...

This paper analyzes whether changes in the timing of equalizing transfers to state governments necessitate an adjustment in federal corrective policy. According to the existing literature (assuming an ex-ante choice of transfers), the corrective grant is equal to the marginal damage/benefit...

Productivity is a most important determinant of national wealth and standards of living. Scholars have shown that different welfare production regimes pursue distinct human capital formation policies to promote productivity. But do those government policies actually promote the productivity of...

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone...

Leading economic institutions such as the World Bank have argued that liberalization holds the key to growth, poverty alleviation and redistribution. Even recent efforts to model increasing returns within the framework of new growth theories have not resulted in prescriptions for stronge roles...

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...

A model where a portion of the population participates in illegal activities is developed. The propensity to participate in crimes depends on the probability and the opportunity cost of being arrested. The government can influence these variables by law enforcement expenditure and by social...

Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

Voters often dismantle constitutional checks and balances on the executive. If such checks and balances limit presidential abuses of power and rents, why do voters support their removal? We argue that by reducing politician rents, checks and balances also make it cheaper to bribe or influence...