A rich literature has noted political business cycles in democracies. We argue that an autocracy with strong bureaucratic institutions, the pressure of evaluation and promotion also generated tax-break policies. Furthermore, timing content have driven leaders to use tax breaks strategically build economic performance, producing distributional consequences. Combining panel data 1,510,153 firm-ye...

FORMALITY: CONCEPTS, MEASUREMENT, AND TRENDS ..................................................................................... 3 CONCEPTS .................................................................................................................................................................... 3 MEASUREMENT AND TRENDS ....................................................................

This paper investigates local government consolidations with a focus on public choice aspects in the decision-making. Politicians could lose future payoffs if their locality merges with a larger counterpart, and they may sabotage the merger process. The analysis with data from 3,212 Japanese municipalities reveals that a long-serving mayor would present an obstacle to consolidation.

As part of the amendment, the state was required to construct legal, regulatory, and tax frameworks that would allow businesses to cultivate, process, and sell marijuana not simply to medical patients—as had been happening in Colorado for over a decade—but to anyone 21 and older. This change came despite existing federal prohibition of marijuana and opposition from the governor, state attorney ...

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election ...

Objectives. Although urban scholarship has come to better understand the dynamics of black political incorporation in the United States, to date scant empirical attention has been paid to an important element of minority representation in local politics—the rise of black mayors. The present study addresses this gap in the extant literature. Methods. We analyze incidences of black mayoralties by...