1 The last clause is important. If we have little confidence in our model of the economy, or political economy, the value of an extension of any normative statement relative to that economy to a concrete existing economy is considerably devalued. 2 This framing of the issues directly contradicts the claims made for the new research on the political economy of policy reform in Rodrik (1993). I h...

Destructivity: a Political Economy of Military Effectiveness in Conventional Combat by Charles A. Miller Department of Political Science Duke University Date:

I discuss the role of economic theory in empirical work in development economics with special emphasis on general equilibrium and political economy considerations. I argue that economic theory plays (should play) a central role in formulating models, estimates of which can be used for counterfactual and policy analysis. I discuss why counterfactual analysis based on microdata that ignores gener...

This paper presents a political economy model of public standards in an open economy model. We use the model to derive the political optimum and to analyze different factors that have an influence on this political equilibrium. The paper discusses how the level of development influences the political equilibrium. We also analyze the relation between trade and the political equilibrium and compa...

In recent years some of the best theoretical work on the political economy of political institutions and processes has begun surfacing outside the political science mainstream in high quality economics journals. This two-part paper surveys these contributions from a recent five-year period. In Part I, the focus is on elections, voting and information aggregation, followed by treatments of parti...

This paper considers the political economy of tobacco regulation-that is, the interplay between politics and markets in tobacco regulation. In surveying the interest-group politics of tobacco control, it describes political advantages held by a profitable and concentrated industry engaged in tobacco production. It also considers reasons for the surprising political success of tobacco control ad...

Large di erences in hourly compensation exist between the natives (urban hukou holders) and rural to urban migrants of the Chinese cities, a third of which cannot be explained by any variation in observable characteristics. This paper attempts to explain the di erences using a Tiebout-esque political economy model of migration in which rents are appropriated from the migrants by the rent-seekin...

Derived pension rights exist in most Social Security systems but with variable generosity. They are mainly targeted towards non-working wives and widows and are viewed as a means to alleviate poverty among older women living alone. The purpose of this paper is to explain how they can emerge from a political economy process when the Social Security is a combination of Bismarckian and Beveridgian...

Why do national governments choose the monetary institutions they do? While this question has long interested political economists, previous literature on the topic suffers from a central limitation: the choices of exchange-rate regime and central bank independence (CBI) have been analyzed in isolation from one another. This is surprising given that prominent arguments from this literature port...