We study political compromise founded on tacit cooperation. Two political parties must share a fixed pie in each of an infinite sequence of periods. In each period, the party in power has ultimate authority to divide the pie. Power evolves according to a Markov process among a set of political...

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...

This paper shows that electoral incentives affect the occurrence of trade disputes. Focusing on WTO disputes filed by the United States during the 1995-2012 period, we show that U.S. presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re-election date. Moreover, disputes...

Politicians frequently undertake projects whose budgetary costs are disproportionate to the benefits they create for the voters or shareholders those decision-makers represent. When they are not the result of simple random mistakes, such wasteful projects are often attributed to weak mechanisms...

This Paper analyses an overlapping generation model of public good provision under repeated voting. The public good is financed through age-dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment. Taxes redistribute income both across different skill groups and across generations. We contrast...

We construct a set of indicators to measure the policy-making role of the European Union (European Council, Parliament, Commission, Court of Justice, etc.), in a selected number of policy domains. Our goal is to examine the division of prerogatives between European institutions and national...

Many collective decision problems have the common feature that individuals' desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This Paper studies collective decisions with private information about these desired policies. Each agent holds private information that mainly concerns their own bliss...

This Paper studies a model of public policy with heterogeneous citizens/voters and two public goods: one (roads) is chosen directly by an elected policy-maker, and the other (pollution) depends stochastically on the amount of roads. Both a one-country and a two-country version of the model are...

We review current methods for calculating fines against cartels in the US and EU, and simulate their deterrence effects under different assumptions on the legal and economic environment. It is likely that European fines have not had significant deterrence effects before leniency programs were...