A conservation good, such as the rainforest, is a hostage: it is possessed by S who may prefer to consume it, but B receives a larger value from continued conservation. A range of prices would make trade mutually beneficial. So, why doesn't B purchase conservation, or the forest, from S? If this...

This paper studies the strategic role of extremism within a two-country multi-stage game and shows that, in general, an equilibrium exists in which extremism is used by both rivals. We show that often changes in the environment affect the two countries differently. Specifically, as a country...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

This paper measures the causal effect of coalition vs. single-party governments on fiscal policies using a data set of 396 municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in the time period 1985-2004. Using a regression discontinuity design to take the endogeneity of the type of...

In this note, we use the technique of option sets to sort out the implications of coalitional strategyproofness in the spatial setting. We also discuss related issues and open problems. -- social choice ; strategyproofness ; voting

Recent empirical data indicate that the Commission's proxy access proposals reduce shareholder wealth and are inimical to the best interests of the shareholder community at large. Cross-sectional variation in stock price response data further suggest that the Commission should reject a...

We exploit three natural experiments in Argentina in order to study the role of legislative malapportionment on the biased federal tax sharing scheme prevalent in the country. We do not find support to attribute it to legislative malapportionment during periods when democratic governments were...

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties. The model formalizes the tradeoff between resources at the leader's discretion, and the leader's need to maintain a minimum level of support to continue leading. The value of the leader's promises of future...

With ideological parties being better informed about the state of the world than voters, the true motivation of policy proposals is hard to judge for the electorate. However, if reform proposals have to be agreed upon by government members with heterogeneous policy preferences, it may become...

In this paper, we investigate how political institutions affect policy outcomes. In particular, does the level of political centralization affect the outcome of environmental decentralization? We use a cross section of up to 110 countries and a propensity score estimation approach. We find that...