ABSTRACT This study offers causal evidence on how distinct forms of civic engagement affect government spending across 28 democracies between 2000 and 2024. Its main innovation lies in disentangling the fiscal effects of two channels of engagement—civil society participation and electoral turnout—through an original identification strategy that exploits exogenous variation in collective versus self‐interested motives. Our findings reveal that civic engagement exerts distinct effects on public spending depending on the channel through which citizens participate in democratic life. On the one hand, stronger participation in civil society associations leads to higher government spending, consistent with a publicly spirited and collective mobilisation effect. On the other hand, greater electoral participation is associated with lower public expenditure, as more collective‐interested individuals distance themselves from the traditional electoral channel, and more self‐interested individuals ask for less public spending. We explore these underlying mechanisms, propose strategies to address key identification challenges and further consider the impact of civic engagement on environmental protection and green politics dynamics.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the influence of a CEO's firstborn son on corporate investment, taking into account the contingent role of the CEO's birth after the Cultural Revolution and the number of sons. Using a unique data set of the top 500 richest individuals and their associated corporate investments on the Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong stock exchanges between 2008 and 2020, our findings demonstrate that a CEO's firstborn son has a significant positive impact on corporate investment. Moreover, the number of sons and the CEO's birth after the Cultural Revolution have opposite moderating effects on this relationship. This finding adds new insights for corporate investment from the behavior finance perspective and guides firms' investment efficiency improvement.

ABSTRACT When governments invest millions in climate‐resilient power grids, an unexpected consequence emerges: Energy bills soar so high that vulnerable families can no longer afford basic electricity. This study investigates how extreme climate risks influence household energy poverty through multiple transmission channels using comprehensive panel data linking household energy consumption patterns with detailed climate indicators. We find that extreme climate risks significantly exacerbate household energy poverty, creating what we term “adaptive inequality” where climate protection becomes a luxury good. The analysis reveals distinct transmission pathways: Infrastructure disruption increases system failure rates, while temperature extremes drive energy price volatility that disproportionately burdens low‐income households. Heterogeneity analysis shows that families in regions with incomplete energy infrastructure, high natural disaster vulnerability, and limited economic resources face particularly severe impacts. Our findings demonstrate that climate adaptation creates “selective vulnerability” where identical policies simultaneously protect wealthy households while pushing poor ones into energy deprivation. These results challenge current policy frameworks that focus on building resilient systems while ignoring distributional consequences, suggesting the need for frameworks ensuring resilience does not become another form of social exclusion.

ABSTRACT Does the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom Index (EFI) constitute, as its proponents claim, a coherent measure of a classically liberal approach to economic governance? Noting the central role of individualism to liberalism, we provide evidence on this claim by investigating the empirical relationship between individualism and the EFI. Our findings suggest that there is a strong, positive relationship between individualism and the EFI. This relationship is robust to the use of alternative measures of individualism, to controls for a wide range of historical, cultural and institutional variables, and to the use of instrumental variable methods to address measurement and endogeneity issues. We also find evidence of a strong positive, causal relationship between individualism and four of the five components of the EFI. While these findings broadly support the claim that the EFI provides a measure of a classically liberal approach to economic governance, they also present challenges the empirical literature on the EFI. In particular, it is unclear whether liberal economic policies or the individualist values that underlie these policies are responsible for the positive relationship between the EFI and measures of social welfare.

ABSTRACT Constitutional political economy theory implies that systems of rights can emerge from different processes, but the rights that initially emerge tend to be unequal and to change through time. In some cases, rights may become more equal and universal, but not often. If rights are consequential, then understanding their origins and the political, economic, and cultural processes that generate and support them is obviously important. This paper reviews CPE theories that provide a logical basis for thinking about the origins and evolution of rights and provides evidence that democratic politics and open markets tend to support relatively equal, broad, and universal rights.

ABSTRACT In the absence of a retirement age constraint at the IMF, this study explores the tenure persistence within the Board of Directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2009 to 2021, through a survival analysis. The findings highlight that extrinsic factors, namely sovereign crises, banking crises, the ratio of debt‐to‐GDP, and political transformations, exert a predominant role in tenure longevity, while sociodemographic characteristics such as age, education, or gender have a negligible influence. In summary, survival within this board is primarily governed by geopolitical and economic variables rather than by individual attributes.

ABSTRACTWhen decentralized governments share the public budget, distributive policies are needed to allocate public goods and services among them. To date, however, both the theoretical and empirical literature has largely examined the effect of political orientation on the quantity of transfers received, without considering how efficiently they are managed. This article aims to fill this gap by linking the literature on political alignment and transfers with work on public sector efficiency. Specifically, we examine how bureaucratic input choices might be related to political orientation and political sign and how political coordination between local and higher levels of government could lead to inefficiencies due to clientelism, corrupt practices, or lack of transparency. Our results suggest that political alignment between local governments and higher level governments may lead to a decrease in public sector efficiency, which is detrimental to distributive policies.

No abstract is available for this article.