This paper examines the effects of an exogenous shift in the cost of contractual completeness induced by workload spikes on the endogenous selection of procurement terms. I conduct an instrumental-variable estimation of the causal effect of workload on contracting. In a sample of 150−thousand contracts from 85 civilian procurement offices over 11 years, increases in contracting officer workload...

Tax-Benefit Systems in Europe and the US: Between Equity and Efficiency Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor supply elasticities on microdata...

International Integration, Risk and the Welfare State How does international integration affect the welfare state? Does it call for a leaner or an expanded welfare state? International integration may affect the distortions caused by welfare state activities but also the risks motivating social insurance mechanisms. This paper addresses these potentially counteracting effects in a fully specifi...

Article history: Received 21 June 2009 Received in revised form 6 April 2010 Accepted 27 June 2010 Available online 29 July 2010 Rational choice models predict that political competition and political participation have opposite effects on the size of government. We investigate these theories using data from a panel of 18 Latin American countries during the 20th century. Our research builds evi...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the shadow economy in the Spanish Autonomous Communities. In so doing, we employ the Currency Demand Approach to analyze the 1987–2010 period. The results show that the size of the shadow economy ranges from 18% to 30% of regional GDP and an approximate mean value of 25% for the entire territory. The Personal Income Tax has the greatest impact on the shadow e...

The European Union (EU) is facing the challenge of enlargement to almost double its size; which has strong implications for the balance of power among member states. Building on the work of Shapley (1977) and Owen (1972), we present a measure of power that is based on players’ preferences and number of votes. We apply this measure to the Council of Ministers to see who wields power now and who ...

A commonly alleged pitfall of decentralization is that poverty, socio-economic inequality and lack of political competition allow local elites to capture local governments. This hypothesis is empirically examined using a longitudinal sample of 89 West Bengal villages concerning targeting of credit, agricultural input kits, employment programs and fiscal grants spanning the period 1978–98. Highe...

Models of expressive voting postulate that voters will ‘consume’ ideological or moral stances on issues by voting for them, even when they are against the voter’s own narrow self interest, if the probability of being a decisive voter is low. When a voter is unlikely to sway the outcome of the vote, the odds that a voter will incur any real personal cost (a higher tax burden, for example) from h...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and its subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between opposing groups–that disagree on the composition of public consumption–results in governments being endogenously short-sighted: Systematic under investment in infrastructure and overspending on public goods arise, as resou...

We examine a new dataset of public procurement laws, practice, and outcomes in 187 countries. measure regulation as restrictions on the discretion procuring entities. find that laws practice are highly correlated with each other across countries, better is outcomes, but themselves not outcomes. A closer look shows stricter correlate improved only countries low sector capacity. present model whi...