In their seminal work, The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and Tullock develop a decision model which embodies fundamental relation­ships relevant to institutional choices. However, the Buchanan-Tullock model remains "general," thus inviting others to specify details and to develop...

According to the demonstration effect theory, parents make intergenerational transfers to their elders in order to elicit a symmetric future behavior from their children. In this paper we show that upstream transfers are expected to increase with low returns from alternative financial assets and...

We consider the role of asymmetric information on the emergenceof collusion between criminals and enforcers, in the framework proposed by Bowles and Garoupa (1997) and Polinsky and Shavell (2001). Our paper proposes that the optimal criminal sanction for the underlying o®ense is not necessarily...

Using two alternative measures of expected inflation, this study investigates the impact of federal budget deficits on nominal long-term interest rate yields for the 1973.2-1995.4 period. Based on an open­ economy loanable funds framework, four instrumental variable esti­mates in first...

The debate by Okada & Samreth (2012, EL) and Asongu (2012, EB; 2013, EEL) on ‘the effect of foreign aid on corruption’ in its current state has the shortcoming of modeling corruption as a direct effect of development assistance. This note extends the debate by assessing the channels of foreign...

The present paper is motivated by the interest of a more thorough analysis of the determinants of remittances for developing countries. Thus, a simple formal remittance behaviour model is provided in which the amounts of the sums transferred are negatively related to the migrants’ individual...

In this paper, we examine how children care for their elderly parents and the motives of these family transfers, accounting for interactions between parents and their different children. We study a theoretical model of intergenerational transfers based on altruism, where siblings care for their...

We consider a model of international migration with heterogeneity in the skill level of workers which accounts for country−specific educational investment, unemployment expectations and return to the origin country. We prove that migrants invest less than natives in human capital formation...

What would the true government expenditure and tax burden im­pacts of California's Proposition 4 likely be if it (or its equivalent) were enacted in all 50 states? What happened to actual state plus local government expenditures per capita over the period 1970-1976 is examined. Next, we examine...

This paper models a dynamic scholar’s allocation of time between academia and professional activities outside academia, given the academic labor market and social interactions. The model shows how particularly in less developed countries business and political networks may have large negative...