Do politicians tend to follow a strategy of ambiguity in their policy positions or a strategy of reputational development to reduce uncertainty about where they stand? Ambiguity could allow a legislator to avoid alienating constituents and to play rival interests off against each other to...

The perceived importance of "special interest group" money in election campaigns motivates widespread use of caps on allowable contributions. We present a bargaining model in which putting a cap that is not too stringent on the size of the contribution a lobby can make improves its bargaining...

This paper argues that campaign finance policy, in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing, can be Pareto improving even under the most optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters. The argument assumes that candidates use...

Many political markets are essentially uncontested, in the sense that one candidate raises little (or no) money and consequently has little chance of election. This presents a puzzle in the presence of apparently low barriers to entry. Using a variant of Baron (1989) we provide a theory...

We experimentally study the effect of alternative campaign finance systems - as characterized by different information structure about donors - on donations, election outcomes, political candidates' policy choices, and welfare. Three alternative campaign finance systems are considered: a full...

We present the first estimates of investment returns and distribution rates for U.S. non-profit endowment funds, based on a comprehensive sample of 29,762 organizations drawn from Internal Revenue Service filings for 2009-2017. Non-profit endowments badly underperform market benchmarks, with...

A common approach to the management of endowment is to treat it as if it were the only asset of the university. This approach leads to prescriptions for optimal investment and expenditure policies that are essentially the same across universities. Indeed, the resulting optimal portfolio...