Migration gives rise to an externality across districts that issue local public debt. Unless taxation is entirely in the form of property taxes, local debt is not fully capitalized in property values (even with a competitive land market) and each district over-accumulates debt. A common debt...

This paper considers political competition and the consequences of political polarization when parties are better informed about how the economy functions than voters are. Specifically, parties know the cost of producing a public good, voters do not. An incumbent's choice of policy acts like a...

An infinitely repeated monetary policy game … la Barro and Gordon (1983) is considered. Before the game starts the government announces a policy rule. If there is a slight probability that government is honest and a slight probability that the government makes mistakes, then a sufficiently...

The paper investigates strategic campaigning in a model of redistributive politics in a society with many groups and two parties. Campaigns are informative, and parties can target campaigns to different groups. Voters are uncertain about whether parties favor special groups. The parties will...

This paper investigates the merits of different democratic institutions when politics is uni-dimensional, there is uncertainty both about the preferences of the future electorate and the future polarization of political parties, and politicians have better information about the state of the...

This paper studies the relation between political polarization and delegation of stabilization policy. There is asymmetric information about how the economy works: unlike voters, two political parties know the variance of an employment shock. Prior to an election each party proposes a central...

Migration raises a potential free rider problem for th eprovision of durable local goods if the late-comers can enjoy the public good without paying for it. Allowing communities to finance public goods by debt mitigates this problem, since future immigrants have to share the burden of the debt....