Who Pays Business Rates?

Non-domestic rates are a tax that is formally levied on the occupiers of nondomestic property in the United Kingdom. This does not imply that it is only the occupiers of business and other non-domestic property who are made worse off by the imposition of ‘business rates’. Some or all of the effective burden of nondomestic rates may be shifted backwards from the occupiers of business property to the owners of business property. This occurs if the rents that property owners can charge their tenants are reduced by the imposition of business rates. In this case, the total cost of occupying a business property (i.e. rent plus rates) is increased by less than the full amount of the non-domestic rates paid by occupiers, and part of the burden of business rates is borne by property owners in the form of lower rental income than they would otherwise have received. The effective incidence of non-domestic rates is then said to fall partly on property owners, and only partly on occupiers

Vote buying or (political) business (cycles) as usual?

We study the short-run effect of elections on monetary aggregates in a sample of 85 low and middle income democracies (1975-2009). We find an increase in the growth rate of M1 during election months of about one tenth of a standard deviation. A similar effect can neither be detected in established OECD democracies nor in other months. The effect is larger in democracies with many poor and uneducated voters, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and in East-Asia and the Pacific. We argue that the election month monetary expansion is related to systemic vote buying which requires significant amounts of cash to be disbursed right before elections. The finely timed increase in M1 is consistent with this; is inconsistent with a monetary cycle aimed at creating an election time boom; and it cannot be, fully, accounted for by alternative explanations

Overlapping political budget cycles in the legislative and the executive

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it is important whether the incumbent re-runs. To account for the potential endogeneity associated with this decision, we apply a unique instrumental variables approach based on age and pension eligibility rules. We find sizable and significant effects in expenditures before council elections and before joint elections when the incumbent re-runs