Tax Contracts and Elections

Hans Gersbach and Maik Schneider

No 09/123, CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich

Abstract: In this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good provision and benefit from perks when in office. A government raises taxes for both purposes. We show that tax contracts yield moderate policies and lead to lower perks by avoiding the formation of grand coalitions in order to win government. Moreover, in polarized societies they unambigously improve the welfare of the median voter.

Keywords: political contracts; elections; government formation; tax promise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2009-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-inter ... papers/WP-09-123.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not found UA (https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/mtec/cer-eth/cer-eth-dam/documents/working-papers/WP-09-123.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/mtec/cer-eth/cer-eth-dam/documents/working-papers/WP-09-123.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tax contracts and elections (2012)
Working Paper: Tax Contracts and Elections (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eth:wpswif:09-123

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().