The winner of a battle for a throne can either execute or spare the loser; if the loser is spared, he contends the throne in the next period. Executing the losing contender gives the winner an additional quiet period, but then his life is at risk if he loses to some future contender. The...

Brennan and Hamlin (2002) note that expressive voting still holds at the constitutional phase. The argument, when taken to its necessary conclusion, proves quite problematic for Constitutional Political Economy. Veil mechanisms following Buchanan induce expressive voting at the constitutional...

This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and affects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and...

The causes and consequences of corruption have attracted much attention in recent years by both academics and policy makers. Central in the discussion on the impact of corruption are perception-based indices. While informative, these indices are ordinal in nature and hence provide no indication...

We study the value of commitment in contests and tournaments when there are costs for the follower to observe the leader's behavior. In a contest, the follower can pay to observe the leader's effort but cannot observe the effectiveness of that effort. In a tournament, the follower can pay to...

In order to analyze conflict and cooperation between a State and a non ruling group in a general equilibrium, I unite pure rent-seeking models and economic models of conflict under an assumption of incomplete property rights. I show that a unique and globally stable Nash equilibrium exists in...

This work is a contribution to the Second Generation Theory (SGT) of fiscal federalism that studies fiscal federalism through contemporary economic and industrial organization theory. First, it establishes context by introducing the two classic motivations in support of federalism, namely,...

This paper examines the two-way relationship between birth interval and child survival and compares the behaviour of households in the Indian and Pakistani provinces of Punjab. Birth interval and child survival are modelled here as correlated hazard processes, allowing for mother- specific...

This paper, a synthesis of salient findings of the authors’ book entitled “Investment Climate Around the World: Voices of the Firms from the World Business Environment Survey”, and based on a chapter in “Pathways Out of Poverty: Private Firms and Economic Mobility in Developing...

This paper presents experimental evidence about how individuals learn from information that comes from inside versus outside their ethnic group. In the experiment, Thai subjects observed information that came from Americans and other Thais that they could use to help them answer a series of...