We develop a model that combines competitive exchange of private commodities across endogenously formed groups with public good provision and global collective decisions. There is a tension between local and global collective decisions. In particular, we show that group formation and collective...

In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with an universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should...

Ever since Sjaastad (1962), researchers have struggled to quantify the psychic cost of migration. We monetize psychic cost as the wage premium for moving to a culturally different location. We combine administrative social security panel data with a proxy for cultural difference based on...

Motivated by emission and resource markets, this paper considers repeated, bilateral barters between owners of commodity bundles, contingent claims, or property rights. Focus is on feasible, voluntary exchanges, driven only by differences in substitution rates. No coordination is ever needed....

We consider competitive markets for multiple commodities with endogenous formation of one- or two-person households. Within each two-person household, externalities from the partner’s commodity consumption and unpriced actions are allowed. Each individual has two types of traits: observable...

A substantial number of regulatory frameworks are commonly viewed by impartial observers as inordinately complex. Is there an explanation for this phenomenon? Employing a partial equilibrium model, this paper approaches the problem of complexity from a political-economy vantage point. It...

This paper provides evidence of efficient taxation of groups with heterogeneous levels of ‘tax morale’. We set up an optimal income tax model where high tax morale implies a high subjective cost of evading taxes. The model predicts that ‘nice guys finish last’: groups with higher tax...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest—which we call a ‘tax lottery’—can...

This paper argues that high political competition does not necessarily induce policy makers to perform better as previous research has shown. We develop a political economy model and we show that when political competition is tight, and elected politicians can rely on more tax instruments, they...

We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves towards democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact...