Joseph Schumpeter Lecture: Paying Politicians: Theory and Evidence

Timothy Besley

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2004, vol. 2, issue 2-3, 193-215

Abstract: This paper looks at the theory behind the idea that paying politicians better will improve their performance. The paper lays out a political agency model with adverse selection and moral hazard where politicians are subject to two-period term limits. This model provides a number of predictions about how the pay of politicians affects agency problems. We also consider what happens when the pool of politicians is endogenous. The main ideas in the model are confronted with data on U.S. governors. (JEL: D72, J33) Copyright (c) 2004 The European Economic Association.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (144)

Downloads: (external link)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1542-4774/issues link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:jeurec:v:2:y:2004:i:2-3:p:193-215

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Xavier Vives, George-Marios Angeletos, Orazio P. Attanasio, Fabio Canova and Roberto Perotti

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().