Tax collection in the Roman Empire: a new institutional economics approach

This paper reviews the Roman tax collection system since the Late Republic to the Principality, focusing on the transition from the tax-farming system to a more centralized, census-based administration. We attempt to justify this transition according to New Institutional Economic theories (Transaction Cost Economics and Property Rights Theory). The paper argues that, during the Republic, the auction-based system of tax farming ended up giving place to opportunistic behaviors and abusing practices due to information asymmetries and contract incompleteness, enhanced by the collusion of tax farmers and governors. The Principality improved the efficiency of the tax collection system through the introduction of a bureaucratic and census-based administration, which allowed imperial employees to monitor the tax-farming activities.

Political inequality, political participation, and support for populist parties

We theoretically investigate how political abstention among certain social groups encourages populist parties to enter the political stage, trying to absorb inactive voters. We design a two-stage game with two established parties and n voters who jointly determine a taxation policy. The electorate is divided into two groups, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Voters’ decisions on whether to participate depend on a party’s tax rate proposal and on general party ideology. Effective political participation requires a certain amount of financial, social and intellectual resources to, for example, evaluate party programs or to engage in political discussion. As the disadvantaged are endowed with fewer resources, they lack political efficacy, resulting in less political participation. Consequently, the established parties propose a tax rate which is biased towards the preferences of the advantaged. The unused voter potential among the disadvantaged draws the interest of a populist challenger. To win support from the disadvantaged, the challenger party optimally proposes a respectively biased tax rate, which then works to polarize the political spectrum.Please confirm if the author names are presented accurately and in the correct sequence (given name, middle name/initial, family name). Author 1 Given name: [Kim Leonie] Last name [ Kellermann]. Also, kindly confirm the details in the metadata are correct.All correct.

Lessons from the Japanese ninja: on achieving a higher trade equilibrium under anarchy and private constitutions

This paper investigates the possibility of anarchy achieving a high trade equilibrium via the example of ninja communities in Japan. Initially, ninjas in the mountainous regions of Iga and Kōka were stateless, constantly feuded, and had few opportunities for exchange. With the advent of civil war in the sixteenth century, ninjas’ economic conditions changed. The mercenary market significantly expanded and presented great profit opportunities for the ninjas. However, instead of creating a formal government to move to a higher trade equilibrium, the ninjas resorted to forming voluntary confederations held together by private constitutions. I argue that this development was possible because the institutional environment of the Sengoku period enabled a framework of self-governing institutions and principles. The ninjas were able to build on this framework with very low organizational costs. As a result, the ninjas were able to reap large economic gains on the mercenary market while remaining stateless—a seemingly paradoxical development that goes against the standard dichotomy of “states and thick markets” versus “anarchy and thin markets.”

Advance voting and political competition

This paper appears to be the first to analyse political campaign incentives when the electorate vote at different moments before Election Day, a phenomenon known as early or advance voting. Many jurisdictions accommodate such voting by accepting mail-in ballots or by opening polling places before Election Day. Since politicians can thereby add campaign promises while citizens vote, they have an incentive to add promises valued by late-voting segments as Election Day approaches. This implies that early-voting segments of the electorate will pay higher taxes and receive lower transfers than had been announced when they voted. Late-voting segments benefit.

Path dependence in administrative adjudication: the role played by legal tradition

Based on the theory of path dependence, we show that legal tradition affects the administrative court’s rulings. It also complements the two other reasons for diversified verdicts: the experience of the judges and courts (specialization) and preference (bias) for one of the parties. This effect is persistent even if the verdicts are controversial and result in serious consequences for a party and when the penalty paid by the complainant is perceived as excessive but fulfilling the strict rules of law. We prove that judicial decision making is a function of path dependency stemming from a legal tradition of the court. To confirm this, logistic regression is applied to a sample of 337 erroneous excise duty documentation cases of heating oil sales from all sixteen provincial administrative courts in Poland. Increasing the specialization of judges and having them exchange experiences may be a remedy for the unjustified adjudication differences.