This paper examines Moldova’s performance in the area of Macroeconomic stabilisation since independence. Analysis of key indicators such as prices, the budget, monetary growth and output reveal that after initial problems progress has been relatively satisfactory more recently. Furthermore, political developments have not impeded reforms to a great extent as they have in other post Soviet repub...

In this paper we present a generalization of power indices which includes the preferences of the voters. Using a Multilinear Extension perspective (Owen, 1972a) we measure the probability of the players’ voting ’yes’ for a particular political issue. Further, we randomize the issues and show the influence that the Agenda Setter can have on a player’s power. We demonstrate these results using da...

The article uncovers and reconstructs the emergence of radical economics in postwar America, starting with the impact of McCarthyism on economics and the teaching of Marxism through the emergence of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) in 1968. In addition, the issue of the historical identity of radical economists is addressed in the article through its narrative that reenacts its ...

We study a model of electoral competition where voters obtain information on candidates’ platforms through campaign advertising, and word-of-mouth communication. We show that when the costs of campaign advertising are low, an increase in word-of-mouth communication among voters causes polarization. In particular, the more voters can exchange political information between each other, the more of...

Government Decentralization as a Disincentive for Transnational Terror? An Empirical Analysis Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while political d...

In this note we analyze whether a federal transfer system can be designed to increase welfare when state governments create political budget cycles. The results show how the federal government can counteract the welfare costs of these cycles, without hindering politicians from signaling their type, by announcing a transfer scheme to subsidize expenditures that voters do not consider when voting...

Job Loss Fears and (Extremist) Party Identification: First Evidence from Panel Data There is a large body of literature analyzing the relationship between objective economic conditions and voting behavior, but there is very little evidence of how perceived economic insecurity impacts on political preferences. Using seventeen years of household panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we...

This article investigates the effect of the intensity of political competition on the tax choices by local governments. More precisely, we study whether local governments determine their tax rates more in a Leviathan way, exploiting a low political competition to vote high tax rates, or in a partisan way, fiscal choices by leftwing governments being significantly in contrast with those by right...

This paper explores the institutional factors behind the crisis of capital accumulation in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of its focus on institutional stability, the paper contributes to the literature on the existence of an apartheid social structure of accumulation in which economic and political institutions are important determinants of investment. Investment function estimat...

Global Aging and Fiscal Policy with International Labor Mobility: A Political Economy Perspective This paper uses an overlapping generations model with international labor mobility and a politically responsive fiscal policy to examine aging in developed and developing regions. Migrant workers change the political structure composed of young and elderly voters in both labor-receiving and labor-s...