The Effects of Capital Mobility, Trade Openness, and Democracy on Social Spending in Latin America, 1980–1999

Empirical studies measuring the impact of globalization on social spending have appeared recently in leading journals. This study seeks to improve upon previous work by (1) employing a more sophisticated and comprehensive measure of financial openness; (2) using a more accurate measure of trade openness based on purchasing power parities; and (3) relying on social spending data that are more complete than those used by previous studies on Latin America. Our estimates suggest that several empirical patterns reported in previous work deserve a second look. We find that trade openness has a positive association with education and social security expenditures, that financial openness does not constrain government outlays for social programs, and that democracy has a strong positive association with social spending, particularly on items that bolster human capital formation.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

Robert Tollison and operationalizing public choice

In this tribute to Robert Tollison, I will outline his contributions to the development of public choice. I focus on Tollison’s work on rent-seeking, the political economy of reform, and the rules level of analysis in sports economics. Throughout his career, Tollison brilliantly figured out ways to take insights from price theory and public choice theory and operationalize them using multiple methods of empirical analysis, including historical interpretation and statistical testing.     

A Different Carbon Tax: The Sustainable Green Tariff

Two heated current political arguments focus on carbon taxes and tariffs. This essay will develop an argument for linking carbon emissions with tariffs, through a tax on goods entering a country based on the method of transport and distance traveled, rather than based on the country of origin or category of the product. The result would be to encourage more sustainable local production, to reduce currently externalized costs of carbon emissions, to generate new tax revenues to fund reductions in regressive social insurance taxes, and to provide benefits for those adversely affected by carbon emissions.     

Appeal rate and caseload: evidence from civil litigation in Korea

Courts of modern democratic societies have generally implemented appeal procedures to correct potential errors in ruling. However, considering the time and effort that both litigants spend, availability of an appeal cannot be better than reaching the correct judgment in the original case. This difficulty raises the policy issue of how to reduce the rate of appeals and improve welfare of litigants. In this paper, we assert that lower caseloads allow judges to expend more time and effort on each case, contributing to lower appeal rates. Analysis of court-level data from Korea corroborates our inference.