We study the volatility of growth rates and find that it differs systematically across countries. Our empirical investigation reveals that there is a high correlation between disparity in political regimes across countries and differences in volatility. This is not the case for some of the...

We study the optimal Mirrlees taxation problem in a dynamic economy with idiosyncratic (productivity or preference) shocks. In contrast to the standard approach, which implicitly assumes that the mechanism is operated by a benevolent planner with full commitment power, we assume that any...

We consider an environment in which a government implements a sequence of tax mechanisms that assign allocations to a population of privately informed agents. These mechanisms are determined by a process of electoral competition with agents voting over political candidate-mechanism pairs in each...

\QTR{it}{The standard framework to study time consistency assumes that economic decisions are made by one legislator. In this paper policies are negotiated in a committee by playing a dynamic voting game. The implications of this change are remarkable: the social optimum becomes time consistent....

Why would a political elite voluntarily dilute its political power by extending the voting franchise? This paper develops a dynamic recursive framework for studying voter enfranchisement. We specify a class of dynamic games in which political rights evolve over time. Each period, private...

This paper develops a joint theory of ideology and redistributive policy to account for the striking divergence found across countries in voters? attitudes about the causes of individual wealth and poverty (self-reliance or societal forces), as well as in the observed social contract...

This paper studies Holmstrom's [1999] seminal model of career concerns, but considers that a small change in the beliefs about the agent's future productivity may imply a large change in his compensation---because, for example, the agent may be fired or promoted. This allows us to study how the...