Rent seeking and the economics of corruption

The paper studies the influence of Gordon Tullock (1967) and the rent-seeking literature more generally on the study of corruption. The theoretical corruption literature with its emphasis on principal-agent relationships within government and rent creation by corruption politicians has largely, but not entirely, overlooked that contestable rents encourage unproductive use of real resources in seeking these rents. As a consequence, the literature underestimates the value of corruption control and the cost of corruption itself

The Democratic Window of Opportunity: Evidence from Riots in sub-Saharan Africa

We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves towards democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact on democratic change, and supports the window of opportunity hypothesis: droughts lead to an increase in the threat of conflict, and incumbents often respond by making democratic concessions

Franchise extension and fiscal structure in the United Kingdom 1820-1913: A new test of the Redistribution Hypothesis

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 novel method of uncovering causality from non-experimental data proposed by Hoover (2001). This method is based on tests for structural breaks in the marginal and conditional distributions of the franchise and fiscal structure time series preceded by a detailed historical narrative analysis. We do not find any compelling evidence that supports the Redistribution Hypothesis

Shades of red and blue: Political ideology and sustainable development

We study the effect of political ideology on sustainable development, measured as investment in genuine wealth, in a dynamic panel of 79 countries between 1981 and 2013. We find that a switch from a left-wing or centrist government to a right-wing government has a robust positive and statistically significant effect on investment in genuine wealth. We find no evidence of opportunistic cycles in these investments

The Big Five personality traits and partisanship in England

We propose a new framework for the study of the psychological foundation of party identification. We draw a distinction between the part of an individual's party preference that is stable throughout adult life and the dynamic part responding to lifecycle events and macro shocks. We theorize that the Big Five personality traits exert a causal effect on the stable part of an individual's party preference and provide evidence from a large nationally representative English panel dataset in support of this theory. We find that supporters of the major parties (Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats) have substantively different personality traits. Moreover, we show that those not identifying with any party, who are close to holding the majority, are similar to those identifying with the Conservatives. We show that these results are robust to controlling for cognitive skills and parental party preferences, and to estimation on a subsample of siblings. The relationship between personality traits and party identification is stable across birth cohorts

The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Captain Swing Riots, 1830-31

Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising, allowing us to estimate the role of contagion in the spread of the riots. We find that local (rather than national) sources of information were central in driving contagion, and that this contagion magnified the impact that social and economic fundamentals had on riots by a factor of 2.65. Our historical data allow us to overcome a number of econometric challenges, but the Swing riots are of independent interest as well: they contributed to the passage of the Great Reform Act, a key step in Britain's institutional development

Redealing the Cards: How the Presence of an Eco-Industry Modifies the Political Economy of Environmental Policies

An incumbent government maximizes its chances of being reelected. Its objective function encompasses both social welfare and political contributions. Its only instrument is a pollution tax. In an open-economy context, we introduce an eco-industry in addition to lobbies of polluting firms and environmentalists. Not only does the eco-industry lobby add a new political contribution toward a higher environmental tax, it also modifies the incentives of the usual lobbies. When the foreign environmental policy is constant, environmentalists can be in favor of a decrease in the local tax in order to reduce foreign pollution. It could also be in the interest of a vertical industrial pressure group to lobby toward more stringent environmental policy. In general, the impact of lobbying activities on the politically optimal tax is ambiguous as pressure groups push in different directions

Inequality, Fiscal Capacity and the Political Regime: Lessons from the Post-Communist Transition

Using panel data for twenty-seven post-communist economies between 1987-2003, we examine the nexus of relationships between inequality, fiscal capacity (defined as the ability to raise taxes efficiently) and the political regime. Investigating the impact of political reform we find that full political freedom is associated with lower levels of income inequality. Under more oligarchic (authoritarian) regimes, the level of inequality is conditioned by the state’s fiscal capacity. Specifically, oligarchic regimes with more developed fiscal systems are able to defend the prevailing vested interests at a lower cost in terms of social injustice. This empirical finding is consistent with the model developed by Acemoglu (2006). We also find that transition countries undertaking early macroeconomic stabilisation now enjoy lower levels of inequality; we confirm that education fosters equality and the suggestion of Commander et al (1999) that larger countries are prone to higher levels of inequality.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57211/1/wp831 .pd

Corruption in Privatization and Governance Regimes

(ISSN 1827-3580