There is a growing literature on the effect of electoral competition and democratic participation on issues such as corruption and government policy. The theoretical and empirical literature suggests that electoral competition has a beneficial impact on policies. This paper studies the effects...

This paper studies the different economic configurations that may give rise to incomplete fiscal decentralization, with the vertical imbalance problem associated to it. Particularly, we look at an economy which has given up monetary policy and cannot monetize national or sub-national government...

This paper provides new evidence on the relevance of alternative theories of federal budget allocation to US States. Using a panel of 48 states over 20 years, we estimate the size and relative importance of different institutional and political factors in determining such allocation. We find...

En este estudio, se evalúa la importancia de las transferencias intergubernamentales sobre el esfuerzo fiscal realizado por los gobiernos locales, así como, el impacto que tienen sobre el nivel de actividad local en el Perú. Usando una base de datos de panel para los municipios distritales y...

According to globalization, certain kinds of public goods, which used to be working as the goods just in a national economy, are getting internationalized or released for foreigners as well. In addition, those goods often exhibit differentiated features for a certain degree. The goods as such...

In this paper, an infinitely-repeated Bertrand game is considered. The model has a two-tier relationship; two firms make a self-enforced collusive agreement and each firm writes a law-enforced contract to its privately-informed agent. The main finding is that in optimal collusion, interaction...

For an N players coordination games, Tanaka (2000) proved that the notion of N/2 stability defined by Schaffer (1988) is a necessary and sufficient condition for long run equilibrium in an evolutionary process with mutations (in the sense of Kandori, et. al. (1993)). We argue that the critical...

The paper studies equilibrium selection in supermodular games based on a class of perfect foresight dynamics, introduced by Matsui and Matsuyama (JET 1995) and further developed by Hofbauer and Sorger (JET 1999, IGTR 2002) and Oyama (JET 2002). A normal form game is played repeatedly in a large...

It is well known that in a two stage duopoly model of product choice with quadratic transportation cost, the firms locate at the extreme endpoints of the market. This paper examines this model in an infinite horizon setting where in the initial period the firms choose locations and in subsequent...

Specialist merchants and traders---agents who mediate the transfer of goods and services between producers and consumers---are central to the economic process, but there are few theoretical models in which the institution of intermediation is an endogenous part of an equilibrium. This paper...