The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

Many environmental-policy problems are characterized by complexity and uncertainty. Government’s choice concerning these policies commonly relies on information provided by a bureaucracy. Environmental bureaucrats often have a political motivation of their own, so they might be tempted to...

A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers some alternative to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding...

This paper analyzes the effect of spillovers and congestion of local public goods on the segregative properties of endogenous formation of jurisdiction. Households living in the same place form a jurisdiction and produce a local public good, that creates positive spillovers in other...

As representatives of nation-states in global financial markets, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) share a common form and many functions. Arguably their form and functions owe as much to a shared (global) moment of institutional formation as they owe their form and functions to the hegemony of...

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under...

The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the potential for resource curse in the renewable energy sector. Taking a political economy approach, we analyze the link between public support schemes for renewable energy and the potential scope for rent seeking and corruption. The insights...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with...

In this study we analyze the effects of corruption on income inequality and poverty. Our analysis advances the existing literature in four ways. First, instead of using corruption indices assembled by various investment risk services, we use an objective measure of corruption: the number of...

In this paper, we empirically investigate a channel through which social capital may improve economic wellbeing and the functioning of institutions: political accountability. The main idea is that voters who share norms of generalized morality demand higher standards of behavior on their elected...