See 'Political Connections And Preferential Access To Finance: The Role Of Campaign Contributions' in <A HREF="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VBX-4P3DY39-4&_user=499884&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1004038141&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000024499&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=499884&md5=d48c00bd293b73b16a75eb763ff75630"><I>Journal of Financial Economics</I>, 2008, 88(3), 554-580</A>.

The collection of information necessary for decision-making is often delegated to agents (e.g. bureaucrats, advisors, lawyers). If both the pros and cons of a decision have to be examined, it is better to use competing agents instead of a single agent. The reason is that two conflicting pieces...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

A government officials' propensity to corruption, or corruptibility, can be affected by his intertemporal preference over job benefits. Through a dynamic model of rent-seeking behavior, this paper examines how endogenously determined corruptibility changes with monitoring intensity, salary...

This paper explores the feasibility to extend the Standard Cost Model (SCM) for calculating the costs of government regulation by taking all transaction costs into account which stem from the principal/agent relationship between regulatory authorities and economic entities. From that perspective...

This paper tests the policitcal dimensions of the presidential cycle effect in U.S. financial markets. The presidential cycle effect states that average stock market returns are significantly higher in the last two years compared to the first two years of a presidential term. We confirm the...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms. The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

In a democracy, a political majority can influence both the corporate

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...