We analyze public investment in social infrastructure using a two-period model in which a government must intermediate all infrastructure investment. Voters choose a government from two alternative types, high quality and low quality. A high quality government obtains higher returns on infrastructure but also demands a bigger consumption payoff for intermediating investment, implying higher tax...

This paper examines the empirical validity of the prediction that if governments minimize the deadweight loss from raising revenue through inflation and tax finance, there should be a positive contemporaneous association between inflation and the level of tax burdens. We examine the empirical validity of this prediction using data from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Inf...

Government often dominates developing countries. Sometimes government is the only game in town. Countries suffer when rules of this game are deficient and governments are ineffective or predatory. Because this frequently seems to be the case, public sector institutional reforms have emerged as central to development. These reforms are an essential element of interventions by players like the Wo...

In the 1970s, taxation of "windfall" profits from primary products and intervention in trade and production tempted governments into expansionary fiscal policies, whilst stifling the private sector and depressing growth. However, the experience of the recent coffee boom has so far been more favourable: those African countries which liberalized and left a large share of the “windfall” with the p...

Many political economists believe that competition among countries—or regions within them—to attract mobile capital disciplines their governments, motivating them to invest more in infrastructure, reduce waste and corruption, and spend less on non-productive public goods. The result should be convergence on business-friendly policies and clean government. The notion that mobile capital discipli...

Public policy making on asylum takes place in an environment of intense public scrutiny, strong institutional constraints and international collective action problems. By assessing the relative importance of key pull factors of international migration, this article explains why, even when controlling for their differences in size, some states receive a much larger number of asylum seekers than ...