There are three signature features of autocracies. First, there is a wide variety across autocracies in terms of economic performance: some do much better and some much worse than democracies. Second, economic performance of a given autocracy is more sensitive to leader quality, and exhibits...

Developing countries with low tax capacity may rely on predation to finance government functions. Government predation, in turn, is often accused of imposing a choking effect on state-owned enterprises (SOEs), contributing to the latter's poor performance. We formalize this choking effect as a...

We model countersignaling (i.e., very high types refraining from signaling) arising from the tradeoff between persuasion and learning in a signaling game. We assume that the agent has imperfect private information regarding his/her productivity, which the signaling action provides additional...

Robert Wilson criticizes applied game theory's reliance on common-knowledge assumptions. In reaction to Wilson's critique, the recent literature of mechanism design has adopted the goal of finding detail-free mechanisms in order to eliminate this reliance. In practice this has meant restricting...

There are two opposite views regarding whether stronger protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) will benefit or hurt the South. We provide a unification using a model of directed innovations with identical but non-homothetic preferences. For the South, a major benefit of protecting...