Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from...

In this note we discuss two examples of approval voting games.

The lobbying process is modelled as an auction with externalities in which lobbies bid to get implemented thei most-prefered policy. Further more, the government may influence the lobbying process itself by biasing the auction among organized interests. We identify the following trade-off :...

Voting games are characterized by the emergence of dominated strategies, that would be iteratively deleted by rational players. In this note we show, via an example, how applying iterated dominance retricts the set of equilibrium outcomes in Besley and Coate (1997) citizen-candidate model of...

We provide an explanation for why estate taxation is surprisingly little used over the world, given the skewness of the estate distribution. Taxing estates implies meddling with intra-family decisions, which may be frown upon by many. At the same time, the concentration of estates means that a...

Worldwide, but in particular in North America and Europe, the grid infrastructure managers are facing demands for reinvestments in new assets with higher on-grid and off-grid functionality in order to promote energy efficiency and low-carbon conversion of the energy sector. To meet societal...

Conventional capture models rely on the idea that regulator is induced to lenient behavior by the regulated firm through offers of monetary transfers, the bribery model, or future employment, the revolving doors model. To avoid socially costly capture, the political principal should then either...

It is well known that a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium does not exist for a two-player rent-seeking contest when the contest success function parameter is greater than two. We analyze the contest using the concept of equilibrium in secure strategies, which is a generalization of the Nash...

This paper examines efficiency rationales behind uniformity of taxation for public projects. Let a benevolent risk neutral 'constitutional designer' to set an optimal cost-sharing rule for a legislature operating under majority rule. Then the designer will choose 'more equal taxes' for a country...

This paper analyzes the role of yardstick competition for improving political decisions. We examine how performance comparisons across jurisdictions affect the agency problem resulting from uncertainty about politicians (adverse selection) and their policies (moral hazard). We study two forms of...