Jørgen Juel Andersen

Environmental and Resource Economics 71(3) p. 803-823 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0184-x

A government is fiscally constrained if it is unable to raise sufficient tax revenue to finance the first-best level of public spending. When involved in emission trading, a fiscally constrained government will potentially seek to close its fiscal gap through emission permit sales. This fiscal incentive therefore generates a fiscal externality in the permit market that is endogenous to the extent of fiscal constrainedness among the participating countries. Our theory explains how, and when, fiscal externalities may be expected to arise. Moreover, we show that in a permit market equilibrium with fiscal externalities, the initial allocation of emission permits between countries will affect: (1) the price of emission permits, (2) the global distribution of abatement effort, and (3) total greenhouse gas mitigation costs. This is contrary to the textbook model of emission permit markets. Our findings are especially relevant for the EU which is about to allow for trading in emission rights between EU member countries for all emissions outside the European Emissions Trading System..

Comparative Political Studies 47(7) p. 993-1021 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414013488557

The claim that oil wealth tends to block democratic transitions has recently been challenged by Haber and Menaldo, who use historical data going back to 1800 and conclude there is no “resource curse.” We revisit their data and models, and show they might be correct for the period before the 1970s, but since about 1980, there has been a pronounced resource curse. We argue that oil wealth only became a hindrance to democratic transitions after the transformative events of the 1970s, which enabled developing country governments to capture the oil rents that were previously siphoned off by foreign-owned firms. We also explain why the Haber–Menaldo study failed to identify this: partly because the authors draw invalid inferences from their data and partly because they assume that the relationship between oil wealth and democracy has not changed for the past 200 years.

Journal of Public Economics 110 p. 157-166 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2013.10.003

Most theories of voter behavior predict that electoral participation will be higher in elections where more is at stake. We test this prediction by studying how participation is affected by exogenous variation in local governments' financial flexibility to provide pork for their voters.Utilizing simultaneous elections for different offices, we identify a positive effect of election stakes on participation: Higher stakes at the local level increase participation at the local relative to the regional election. Survey evidence indicates that the underlying mechanism relates to citizens' acquisition of information.

Applied Economics 45(4) p. 465-476 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2011.605762

Governments in resource abundant economies face a tradeo¤ between transferring wealth to present generations and saving for future generations. Employing an overlapping generations framework with endogenous growth, this paper analyzes the intergenerational welfare e¤ects of: (1) a wealth transfer policy where the entire wealth is transferred to the generations alive at present; (2) an income transfer policy where the wealth is saved and the permanent income of the wealth is transferred to all present and future generations, forever. Not surprisingly, present generations are unambiguously better o¤ with the wealth transfer policy. Less trivially, however, the wealth transfer policy can be associated with higher wel-fare also for future generations. The intuition for this result is that while a wealth transfer depresses growth only in the periods subsequent to the transfer, income transfers constitute a permanent drag on growth. Perhaps counter to the naïve intuition, the policy of saving the wealth and distributing the permanent income to all present and future generations is less bene cial for the future generations if the real return to saving is high

Journal of Development Economics 100(1) p. 89-106 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2012.08.008

Political economy theories on the “natural resource curse” predict that natural resource wealth is a determining factor for the length of time political leaderships remain in office. Whether resource wealth leads to longer or shorter durations in political office depends on the political incentives created by the natural resources, which in turn depend on the types of institutions and natural resource. Exploiting a sample of more than 600 political leadership durations in up to 152 countries, we find that both institutions and resource types matter for the effect that natural resource wealth has on political survival: (i) wealth derived from natural resources affects political survival in intermediate and autocratic, but not in democratic, polities; and (ii) while oil and non-lootable diamonds are associated with positive effects on the duration in political office, minerals are associated with negative duration effects.

Public Choice 153(1-2) p. 83-115 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-011-9776-0

Existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system. This paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary taxation. A main result is that if taxation is sufficiently distortionary, the parliamentary system may promote a smaller size of government than the presidential system. The proposed mechanism appears consistent with several empirical patterns in the data that cannot be explained by other theories.

European Journal of Political Economy 27(2) p. 297-310 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2010.10.004

Using a combination of time-series variation in oil prices and cross-section variation in the oil intensity of countries, this paper investigates whether exogenous shifts in the government revenues a¤ect the government expenditures di¤erently depending on the political institutions of the form of government. Comparing the scal policy dynamics in parliamentary and presidential systems, a main nding is that the government expenditures appear more responsive to shifts in the revenues when the form of government is presidential.

Journal of Development Economics 87(2) p. 227-246 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2007.12.005

Utilizing the fact that natural resources are randomly distributed among countries, we investigate how public income shocks have different long run economic effects dependent on constitutional arrangements. We find that (i) the so-called ‘resource curse’ is present in democratic presidential countries—but not in democratic parliamentary countries, (ii) being parliamentary or presidential matters more for the growth effects of natural resources than being democratic or autocratic, and (iii) natural resources are more likely to reduce growth when proportional electoral systems are in place than when the electoral systems are majoritarian. The two first effects appear very robust, the last effect less so.