Protecting Property: The Politics of Redistribution, Expropriation, and Market Openness

This paper develops a formal model to disentangle the competing political incentives for redistribution, expropriation, and market openness. Although redistribution and expropriation are both types of government extraction, redistribution re‐allocates wealth within the citizenry, while expropriation re‐allocates wealth from citizens to the government. Representative political institutions increase redistribution and reduce expropriation. Market...