At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

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...

This paper studies Holmstrom's [1999] seminal model of career concerns, but considers that a small change in the beliefs about the agent's future productivity may imply a large change in his compensation---because, for example, the agent may be fired or promoted. This allows us to study how the...

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...

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...

In this paper I analyse how careerist judges formulate their decisions using information they uncover during deliberations as well as relevant information from previous decisions. I assume that judges have reputation concerns and try to signal to an evaluator that they can interpret the law...

In an environment where voters face an inference problem on the competence level of policy makers, this paper shows how subjecting these policy makers to reelection can reduce the degree of policy experimentation to the benefit of the status quo.  This may be a reason why some notable policy...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....