Subsidizing charitable giving—for example, for victims of natural disasters—is very popular, not only with governments but also with private organizations. Many companies match their employees’ charitable contributions, hoping that this will foster the willingness to contribute. However, systematic analyses of the effect of such a matching mechanism are still lacking. This article tests the eff...

An identity links the rate of economic growth, the speed of poverty reduction and changes in the distribution of income during some time period in a given country. A few authors used that identity to understand the causes for observed changes in poverty and to identify the exact role of economic growth in poverty reduction. Yet, many empirical cross-country studies of the relationship between g...

Many developing countries have suffered under the personal rule of kleptocrats, who implement highly inefficient economic policies, expropriate the wealth of their citizens, and use the proceeds for their own glorification or consumption. We argue that the success of kleptocrats rests, in part, on their ability to use a divide-and-rule strategy, made possible by the weakness of institutions in ...

In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for making politicians act in voters’ interests, but voters are unable to prevent that some resources are diverted to political rents. With two levels of government, the rents are reduced if voters require higher bene…cial public expenditures for reelecting incumbents. Voters can also strengthen their power by holding politicians also liable f...

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases. One needs this parameter for cost-benefit analysis, for optimal taxation and for the (Atkinson) measurement of inequality. We estimate this parameter using four large cross-sectional surveys of subjective happiness and two panel surveys. Altogether, the data cover over 50 co...

Persson and Tabellini (2003) show that presidential regimes and majoritarian election systems have important effects on fiscal policy, government effectiveness and productivity. Here, their dataset is extended in a number of ways: the number of countries included is increased from 85 to up to 116, and more recent data for both government effectiveness and productivity are used. In replicating a...