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on Positive Political Economics |
| By: | Stefan Voigt |
| Abstract: | Judicial independence is not only a necessary condition for the impartiality of judges, it can also endanger it: judges that are independent could have incentives to remain uninformed, become lazy or even corrupt. It is therefore often argued that judicial independence and judicial accountability are competing ends. In this paper, it is, however, hypothesized that they are not necessarily competing ends but can be complementary means towards achieving impartiality and, in turn, the rule of law. It is further argued that judicial accountability can increase per capita income through various channels one of which is the reduction of corruption. First tests concerning the economic effects of JA are carried out drawing on the absence of corruption within the judiciary as well as data gathered by the U.S. State Department as proxies. On the basis of 75 countries, these proxies are highly significant for explaining differences in per capita income. |
| Keywords: | Judicial Independence; judicial accountability; rule of law; economic growth; corruption; constitutional political economy. |
| JEL: | H11 K40 O40 P51 |
| Date: | 2005–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:icr:wpicer:19-2005&r=pol |
| By: | Hervé Crès (HEC School of Management); Mich Tvede (Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen) |
| Abstract: | We consider a standard insurance economy where consumers are supposed to vote over menus of insurance contracts: A menu of contracts is majority stable if there does not exist another menu which is supported by an appropriate majority of consumers. We compute the smallest level of super majority for which there always exists a stable menu of contracts, and such that all stable menus of contracts are Pareto optimal. Lower super majority voting rules may ensure existence of stable menus if individual states and/or types of consumers are aggregated, but then stable menus of contracts need not be Pareto optimal: hence a trade-off between Pareto optimality and conservativeness of the voting rule is exhibited. |
| JEL: | D7 D8 |
| Date: | 2005–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kud:kuiedp:0514&r=pol |
| By: | Jørn Rattsø (Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology); Jon Hernes Fiva (Centre for Economic Research and Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology) |
| Abstract: | Decentralization of government with property tax financing is the standard recipe for public sector reform. Fiscal competition is assumed to stimulate efficiency and hold down the tax level. Property taxation offers additional incentives for efficiency. We study the incentive mechanisms involved using data for decentralized governments and in a setting where they can choose to have property taxation or not. The empirical analysis addresses whether fiscal competition and political control problems influence the choice of having property taxation. The results indicate that both incentive mechanisms are relevant and consequently support the standard advice. Fiscal competition generates a distinct geographic pattern in local taxation and political fragmentation seems to motivate property taxation to control common pool problems. The main methodological challenge handled concerns spatial interaction with discrete choice. |
| Keywords: | property taxation; fiscal competition; political fragmentation; Bayesian analysis; spatial autoregressive model |
| JEL: | C11 C21 D78 H71 |
| Date: | 2005–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nst:samfok:5305&r=pol |