We study the effect of franchise extension on the fiscal structure of central and local governments in the United Kingdom between 1820 and 1913 to revisit the Redistribution Hypothesis - the prediction that franchise extension causes an increase in state-sponsored redistribution. We adopt a...

We discuss and provide an overview of the size and role of the government, notably in terms of what the government "should" do, how the government could spend and intervene in the economy, how much governments spend and what they spend their money on. This is done from a historical perspective...

Policy ambiguity in the form of non-directional and non-purposeful use of state resources has made sustainable growth outcomes a mirage in Nigeria. Recent economic crisis prompted the debate on how increased government spending induces sustainable economic growth in Nigeria. This paper examines...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional...

Does trade openness systematically imply bigger governments, as proposed by Rodrik (1998)? This paper presents a novel and more refined explanation for when and why international trade may enlarge the public sector. We propose that trade openness is associated with bigger governments if (i) the...

Expansion of the public sector and redistributive policies may reduce income inequality, but formal tests suffer from the problem of endogeneity of government size with respect to the distribution of income. Studying 30 European countries over the period 2004-2015, we apply instrumental variable...

Expansion of the public sector and redistributive policies may reduce income inequality, but formal tests suffer from the problem of endogeneity of government size with respect to the distribution of income. Studying 30 European countries over the period 2004-2015, we apply instrumental variable...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size were incorrectly specified, not accounting for cross-sectional dependence,...