We study a political economy model of entry barriers. Each period the policymaker determines whether to impose a high barrier to entry, and the special interest groups try to influence the policymaker’s decision. Entry is accompanied by creative destruction—when many new firms enter, old firms are more likely to be driven out of the market. Therefore the current incumbents (industry leaders) te...

The No Child Left Behind Act represents the federal government's most significant foray into the nation's elementary and secondary public school policy-making terrain. Although the Act undertakes unassailable policy goals, its critics argue that it represents an unwarranted federal intrusion into education policymaking, generates unintended policy consequences, and amounts to an unfunded federa...

The paper provides a political economy theory of the Kuznets curve. When development leads to increasing inequality, this can induce political instability and force democratization on political elites. Democratization leads to institutional changes which encourage redistribution and reduce inequality. Nevertheless, development does not necessarily induce a Kuznets curve, and it is shown that de...

New media technologies are seen to be changing the production, delivery and consumption of professional sports and creating a new dynamic between sports fans, athletes, clubs, governing bodies and the mainstream media. However, as Bellamy and McChesney (2011) have pointed out, advances in digital technologies are taking place within social, political, and economic contexts that are strongly con...

The number of school districts in the United States has fallen from around 130,000 in 1930 to just under 15,000 at present. Despite the large observed decline, many districts resisted consolidation before ultimately merging and others never merged, choosing to remain at enrollment levels that nearly any education cost function would deem ine¢ ciently small. Why do some districts voluntarily int...

This paper provides a review and assessment of the extensive literature on the political determination of environmental regulation. A promising theoretical literature has emerged relatively recently that provides models of the political interaction of government with various interest groups in the setting of environmental standards and the choice of regulatory instruments. A large empirical lit...

This dissertation examines the connection between local government policy and changes in absolute rural poverty. Understanding this insufficiently studied relationship will help us to clarify theoretical questions on the role of the state, market and other factors in reducing poverty, as well as to identify effective policy responses to poverty. Absolute rural poverty varies throughout China, a...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard’s median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. Th...

This report investigates the evolution of economic inequalities and the drivers behind these inequalities. The authors’ economic and political analysis of developments in the labour markets and education and training systems of Germany and the UK, two countries marked by significant differences in political, economic and educational infrastructure, provides fresh contexts for thinking in these ...