This introduction frames key questions on biofuels, land and agrarian change within agrarian political economy, political sociology and political ecology. It identifies and explains big questions that provide the starting point for the contributions to this collection. We lay out some of the emerging themes which define the politics of biofuels, land and agrarian change revolving around global ...

Studies of political economy in recent years have placed emphasis on the operating characteristics of political and economic institutions. The premise of this work is that constitutional features of the political economy provide a structure of institutional incentives inducing equilibrium behavior and practices by optimizing agents. At both the theoretical and empirical levels there are compari...

What is the state of debate regarding gendered political economy? Answering this question depends on the existence of a debate, who is presumed to be participating and, especially, how we understand ‘gender’. Among self-proclaimed feminist scholars we can readily identify a range of positions on ‘gender and political economy’. While disciplinary locations prompt some of the variation, the most ...

labour. In the present analysis however, this would be an oversimplification preventing a correct assessment of the class structure. The proletariat will therefore include only manual and semi-skilled labour. The distinction has its rationale in the fact that the middle class sells its labour in a seller’s market, or at any rate in conditions less unfavourable to the seller than is the case for...

This paper examines the political economy of structural social security reformthe shift from a publicly managed, pay-as-you-go, defined benefit system to one that includes a defined contribution, funded, privately managed pillar. We analyze the connection between the preexisting conditions in a country and the reforms that are likely to succeed and describe some of the strategies that policy-m...

We examine the incentives of regions in a country to unite or to separate. We nd that smaller regions have greater incentives to unite, relative to larger regions. We show, however, that on the whole, majority voting on separation and union generates excessive incentives to separate. This leads us to examine the scope of alternative political institutions and rules in overcoming the potential i...

This book contains a collection of selected readings on the subject of independent regulation. The articles in the book have appeared in reputed journals including the Journal of Law and Economics, Bell Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Virginia Law Review, Journal of Law, Economics and Organ...

The financial support of the National Science Foundation and the Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton University are gratefully acknowledged. I wish to thank many coauthors for sharing their insights about political economy experiments. I am especially indebted to Richard McKelvey. The editors provided helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Capitalism is often defined as an economic system where private actors are allowed to own and control the use of property in accord with their own interests, and where the invisible hand of the pricing mechanism coordinates supply and demand in markets in a way that is automatically in the best interests of society. Government, in this perspective, is often described as responsible for peace, j...

We discuss two essential problems of the political economy of public finances: The principal agent problem between voters and elected politicians and the common pool problem arising from the fact that money drawn from a general tax fund is used to pay for policies targeting more or less narrow groups in society. Three institutional mechanisms exist to deal with these problems, ex-ante rules con...