This paper explores the logic of …scal restraints in a political agencymodel with both moral hazard and adverse selection. The role of thepolitical process is both to discipline incumbents who may act againstthe public interest and to sort in those politicians who are most likelyact in voters'interests. We use the model to examine the optimality ofine¢ cient taxation, limits on the size of government, increasing trans-parency, and yardstick competition. Some conclusions are surprising.For example, we show that some forms of …scal restraint can only bedesirable when incumbents are su¢ ciently likely to be benevolent.We are grateful to Jim Hines and a number of seminar participants for insightfulcomments.1
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.