Governments in emerging markets often behave like a “tormented insurer”, trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid cuts in payments to private agents despite large fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, average public debt-GDP ratios decline as the variability of revenues increases, primary balances and current expenditures follow cyclical patterns sharply at odds with...

This paper combines unique individual-level information on ballot votes with state-level data on expenditures to provide new evidence on how women suffrage has affected government spending. Using data from the last country in Europe to adopt suffrage, Switzerland, we demonstrate two main results. First, women suffrage has changed the scope of government much more than its size. Women are more l...

We test the agency theory of corporate political activity by examining the association between the legality of independent expenditures and antitakeover lawmaking in theUSstates. Exploiting changes in state law regarding the use of corporate independent expenditures in the pre-Citizens United era, we estimate that a state is more likely to pass antitakeover statutes that entrench management whe...

n engl j med 366;11 nejm.org march 15, 2012 973 public insurance have marked the past six decades of health care in the United States. As the country struggles to emerge from a multiyear financial and economic crisis, policymakers and the public have increasingly homed in on those skyrocketing health care expenditures. What lessons can be drawn from the evolution, since 1950, in the sources of ...

The causal relationship between educational investments and student outcomes continues to attract attention. The majority of studies have examined the effectiveness of public school expenditures on student outcomes. This paper attempts to shed light on the impacts of educational inputs by examining a private educational investment—private tutoring that is widely employed by South Korean parents...

This study examines the determinants of public expenditures in advanced market economies by simultaneously assessing the impact of domestic political institutions and globalization. A distinction is made between collective veto points and competitive veto points, demonstrating that not all veto points have restrictive effects. It is shown that public expenditures are significantly and positivel...

The aim of this article is to evaluate the ratio of expenditures between fundamental research, applied research and technological development, to analyse this proportion in the innovation processes of Estonian biotech public sector and private SMEs, and to shape supportive measures to knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship in the biotechnology sector. The empirical study explores Estonian biot...

Government growth has been a long-standing research issue among public economists as well as an important concern of the general public. This paper investigates the impact of government IT investments on government growth. Drawing on the literature on public economics, political sciences, and IT value, I offer theoretical discussions and four mechanisms as to the relationship between IT investm...