We investigate the influence of electoral rules and voter information in elections on voting outcomes and the quality of public officials, using new data on state court judge elections in 39 states in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. We find, first, that voting is very partisan in partisan judicial...

We model a procedural reform aimed at restoring a proper role for the minority in the confirmation process of judicial nominations in the U.S. Senate. We analyze a proposal that would call for nominations to the same level court to be collected in periodic lists and voted upon individually with...

We exploit three natural experiments in Argentina in order to study the role of legislative malapportionment on the biased federal tax sharing scheme prevalent in the country. We do not find support to attribute it to legislative malapportionment during periods when democratic governments were...

In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...

The lack of flexibility in public procurement design and implementation reflects public agents' political risk adaptation to limit hazards from opportunistic third parties - political opponents, competitors, interest groups - while externalizing the associated adaptation costs to the public at...

This paper develops a politico-economic model for use in studying the role of intra-elite conflict in the simultaneous determination of a country's political regime, trade policy and income-tax-based redistribution scheme. Three socioeconomic groups are involved: two elite groups and workers,...

We study the wealth accumulation of Indian parliamentarians using public disclosures required of all candidates since 2003. Annual asset growth of winners is on average 3 to 6 percentage points higher than runners-up. By performing a within-constituency comparison where both runner-up and winner...

Since a key function of competitive elections is to allow voters to express their policy preferences, one might take it for granted that when leadership changes, policy change follows. Using a dataset we created on the composition of central government expenditures in a panel of 71 democracies...

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection...

We employ a regression discontinuity design based on close elections to estimate the rents from a seat in the U.S. congress between 1850-1880. Using census data, we compare wealth accumulation among those who won or lost their first race by a small margin. We find evidence of significant returns...