In this paper, how the two dimensions of heterogeneity of people in society, income disparity and ethnic diversity, affect the reallocation of the income is examined. Specifically a legislative bargaining model is constructed to investigate how the political parties whose platforms are...

Electoral fraud has become an integral part of electoral competition both in established democracies and less-than-democratic regimes. In this paper I study electoral fraud in the non-democratic setting. First, I present evidence of fraud sustainability and growth over the lifetime of...

We present a two-stage coordination game in which early choices of experts with special interests are observed by followers who move in the second stage. We show that the equilibrium outcome is biased toward the experts' interests even though followers know the distribution of expert interests...

We measure the importance of candidate characteristics listed on ballots for a candidate's position on a slate, for preferential votes received by a candidate, and, ultimately, for getting elected. We focus on the effects of gender, various types of academic titles, and also several novel...

This paper proposes a method for detecting electoral fraud in the form of ballot stuffing. As ballot stuffing increases both turnout and the incumbent‘s vote share in precincts where it occurs, precincts with low reported turnout are more likely to be clean. Information on clean precincts is...

I analyze a costly voting model of elections, in which the incumbent can stuff the ballot box, to investigate how electoral fraud affects the participation decisions of voters. I find that two stable equilibria may exist: first, a full abstention equilibrium, where the incumbent wins with...

This study provides evidence of a strong link between two channels facilitating rentextraction in public procurement: between concealing the ultimate ownership of contractors and manipulation of the anticipated value of tenders. Using data on more than 15 300 tenders awarded to joint-stock...

The Anglo-American double-member districts employing plurality-at-large are frequently criticized for giving a large majority premium to a winning party. In this paper, we demonstrate that the premium stems from a limited degree of voters' discrimination associated with only two positive votes...

I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm oers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the certificate...

This paper presents an analog to Cournot duopoly in a model of the local public sector, with one city and a suburb. Reaction functions are derived for the mayor of the city and of the suburb, and properties of the Nash equilibria are analyzed. The translation of the Cournot duopoly model is not...