Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first develop a contractarian theory of redistribution. The existence of rules of redistribution is explained without any recourse to the risk-aversion of individuals. Hence, we depart from the standard legitimization of redistribution as fundamental...

We investigate the effects of government expenditure on private consumption when the private sector anticipates the fiscal shocks. In order to capture anticipation of fiscal policy, we develop a new method based on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR). By simulating data from a theoretical...

This article studies the long-run direction of technological change in an endogenous growth model. Development is modeled as a sequence of temporary equilibria in an overlapping generations framework. We introduce a concept of `long-run efficient development' which excludes persistent...

This paper explores the impact of insatiable needs on the sustainability and the direction of technological change and economic growth. In a simple framework it is shown that growth can only be sustained if either the opportunity costs of research are small at low levels of research or if some...

We introduce a framework of development in which the direction of change is determined endogenously. Which new products, which new qualities and which new techniques are introduced in the course of development is determined by the profitability of different potential innovations. We define a...

Dictatorship is the predominant political system in many developing countries. However, different dictators act quite differently: a good dictator implements growth-enhancing economic policies, e.g. investment in public education and infrastructure, whereas a bad dictator expropriates wealth of...

We use a panel cointegration model with multiple time- varying individual effects to control for the enigmatic missing factors in the credit spread puzzle. Our model specification enables as to capture the unobserved dynamics of the systematic risk premia in the bond market. In order to estimate...

It is commonly assumed in private value auctions that bidders have no information about the realization of the other bidders' valuations. Nevertheless, an informative public signal about the realization may be released by a bidder while he learns his own valuation. Using a simple discrete...