Martin Gregor

• PhD in Economics
• Managing Director at Charles University in Prague

Political influence of special interests is a rich phenomenon, challenging for both theory and empirics. One of the key questions is whether the influence is through the provision of money, information, or both. In the first generation of empirical studies, the monetary channel is examined by looking upon the effect of campaign contributions throug...

We explain Tullock's puzzle of small payments from special interests to policy-makers by the hold-up problem between the two parties. We construct a simple lobbying environment where an uninformed policy-maker is a price-setter who sells access to two opposed and privately informed lobbyists. The key equilibrium property is “the curse of the ex ant...

A team leader and a team follower non-cooperatively produce a team-specific public good out of two complementary tasks. Both team members are identically productive and can contribute to both tasks. By moving first, the team leader effectively determines the division of the tasks in the team. We show that the existence of multiple but finitely many...

This paper argues that the modeling of positive inter-jurisdictional public spending spillovers may benefit from an analysis that involves three stages: the production of local public inputs, the production of local public outputs (accounting for input spillovers and non-additive aggregations), and the consumption of public outputs (accounting for...

This article provides the first comparison of public sector efficiency in and beyond transition. We compare the comprehensive efficiency scores of 202 local governments in the Czech Republic in the transition period of 1995–1998 and the post-transition period of 2005–2008 and identify the period-specific determinants of local government efficiency....

We study a game in which a lobby with verifiable private evidence discloses her evidence to a policy-maker if and only if she agrees to a transfer that is proposed by the policy-maker. This setting is motivated by the literature of pay-and-lobby politics, which finds that politicians schedule informative meetings with lobbyists on the basis of thei...

In this article, we analyse initiatives organized by groups outside of formal politics that involve political confrontation with elected officials, and the need for recourse to the courts. We show that a civic initiative submitted by a proposer gives the voter not only the option to constrain the mayor but also the possibility of learning the mayor...

This paper builds spatial microfoundations for the functional forms used in the analysis of inter-jurisdictional public spending spillovers. It introduces a symmetric bilateral model that distinguishes between three stages: production of multiple public inputs (intermediary goods), production of multiple public outputs (final goods) including asymm...

This paper explains the provision of private rent to powerful members in an organization as an outcome of a contest for power that raises the total contributions to the organization. A necessary condition for a socially efficient contest scheme with reimbursements is characterized.

This survey covers recent literature on lobbying, with particular focus on corporate lobbying. Three main research traditions - contests for policy rent, persuasion games, and multiple means models - are analyzed in detail. Various strategic aspects of lobbying a represented in the context of a single unified model that encompasses both strategic c...

We measure cost efficiency of 202 Czech municipalities of extended scope in period 2003-2008. The study is the first application of overall efficiency measurement of the local governments in the new EU member states, and the second in post-communist countries. We measure government efficiency through established quantitative and qualitative indicat...

We examine a symmetric two-district setting with spillovers of local public spending where a spill-in from the foreign spending is not a substitute, but a complement to domestic spending. Specifically, we assume production of two district-specific public goods out of two complementary district-specific inputs. We compare equilibria in non-cooperati...

Weakest-link global public goods, such as international security, communicable disease prevention or illegal trafficking control, create a strong incentive for rich countries to unilaterally compensate for insufficient supplies of the ‘weakest-link’ inputs by poor countries. We analyze how foreign assistance affects the donor and recipient countrie...

In this paper we examine a class of local crimes that involve perfectly mobile criminals, and perfectly immobile criminal opportunities. We focus on local non-rival crime deterrence that is more efficient against criminals pursuing domestic crimes than criminals pursuing crimes elsewhere. In a standard case of sincerely delegated politicians and ze...

We extend a model of wasteful state aid in Dewatripont and Seabright (2006, Journal of the European Economic Association 4, 513–522) by a supranational controlling authority. The model combines moral hazard and adverse selection to show that politicians fund wasteful projects to signal their effort. Voters, unable to observe project benefits or eff...

This paper examines the equilibrium provision of a public good if the private monetary contributions of identical agents are (im)pure complements. To reconcile complementarity in contributions with the apparent substitutability of monetary payments, we assume a setup with multiple inputs into a complementary production function. This paper proves t...

We survey theories of impacts of budgetary rules in the budget process, review empirical evidence and on the basis of comparative studies attempt to design the optimal shape of the Czech budgetary rules. The theoretical part focuses on conventional and non-intuitive effects of spending caps and spending targets under alternative electoral systems....

We survey theories of impacts of budgetary rules in the budget process, review empirical evidence and on the basis of comparative studies attempt to design the optimal shape of the Czech budgetary rules. The theoretical part focuses on conventional and non-intuitive effects of spending caps and spending targets under alternative electoral systems....

A government applying for a club membership may strategically delay entry to cope with the hold-up problem introduced by anticipatory investments of the private sector. In equilibrium of a two-period incomplete information game, we find that a pro-entry government may strategically delay to imitate an anti-entry government and thereby affect expect...

Municipalities normally compete for tax revenues only indirectly, via non-taxing decisions. Their main instrument of competition is composi-tion of the public spending, which strategically affects locational decisions of mobile workforce in neighbouring regions. We provide a model and seek evidence of strategic interaction between municipality spen...

If local public goods exhibit spillovers and regions are sufficiently symmetric, decentralization implies underprovision, whereas cooperative centralization is associated with strict Pareto-improvement. This classic inference rests on two assumptions: local politicians are delegated sincerely and never provide voluntary transfers to the other regio...

In the fields of social choice, public choice and political economics, the main difference between private and political choice is whether individual preferences are aggregated to make a decision. A much less studied difference is whether beliefs are aggregated to make a decision. In this paper, we argue that the need for aggregation creates differ...

When local public goods are provided by a centralized authority, spillovers are internalized, but heterogeneity in preferences may be suppressed. Besley and Coate (2003) recently examined this classic trade-off for a uniform tax regime with strategic delegation. Here, we extend their approach by allowing for a non-uniform tax regime. We find that c...

We survey the state-of-the-art methods of how to rank economic departments and economists on the basis of 14 studies conducted in years 1995-2005. We cover a diversity of rankings: U.S., worldwide, E.U., those of developed academic nations and those of developing academic nations. Each method rests on a specific goal: while some identify top-notch...

This paper discusses the methodology of quantitative measures of research output. The authors illustrate various approaches to the contentious issue of to how to treat co-authored papers, how to best affiliate migrating authors, and how to quantify the quality of economic periodicals. The authors also summarize the main findings from the three pape...

When local public goods are provided by a centralized authority, spillovers may be coordinated, but heterogeneity in preferences may be suppressed. Besley and Coate (2003) have already solved this classic trade-off for a uniform tax regime. Here, we extend their approach by allowing for a non-uniform tax regime. We find that centralization with our...

Common wisdom dictates that fiscal governance (i.e. procedural fiscal rules) improves fiscal discipline. We rather find that selected fiscal constraints protect the coalitional status quo from logrolling. In effect, fiscal governance may deteriorate fiscal position. In political economy with heterogeneous agents, we examine four procedural fiscal r...

We explore strategic delegation of voters when complementary local public goods, aggregated by the symmetric weakest-link technology, are provided in decentralization and centralization. We show that asymmetric access, asymmetric costs, and existence of penalty for the strictly weakest contribution can lead to conservative bias in delegation. Non-c...

Can different scoring electoral rules differently motivate for instrumental voting in favor of high-quality candidates? For single-member and two-member districts, we consider scoring rules that vary in the numbers of positive and negative votes. Candidates' types are predetermined and differ in binary ideology and binary quality. Voters' ideology-...