Abstract. The credit market collapse and housing-led economic recession beginning in 2007-2008 have resulted in several million distressed homes in the U.S. that are in various stages of delinquency, default, and foreclosure. Over the past three to four years, a number of private equity...

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) are U.S. state mandates that utilities produce some of their electricity using renewable energy sources in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While advocates highlight the potential long-term benefits of RPS, critics argue that RPS will increase...

As at today, it is an indisputable fact that the climate is changing and there is a scientific consensus that the world is becoming a warmer place principally attributable to human activities. Regrettably, the physical impacts of future climate change on humans and the environment will include...

Since last fall, President Obama has repeatedly declared that manufacturing jobs are coming back to America. In this article, however, we suggest that the return of U.S. manufacturing is still more promise than reality.In particular, while the recent increase in natural gas exploration and...

Analysts make competing claims about when and how politicians can use fear to gain support for suboptimal policies. Using a model, we clarify how common attributes of fear affect politicians’ abilities to achieve self-serving outcomes that are bad for voters. In it, a politician provides...

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about human reasoning. One such assumption, that political actors think in complex and similar ways when assessing strategies, is nested within widely used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. Empirical research casts doubt...

Economic policy depends not only on national elections but also on coalition bargaining strategies. In coalition government, minority parties bargain on policy and form a majority coalition, and select a Prime Minister from their mids. In Holland the latter is done conventionally with Plurality,...

The purpose of this paper is to rank economic journals in the broader field of policy and political science. By using one composite input and one composite output the paper ranks 52 journals in a linear programming setting using data for the time period of 1996-2010. In addition for the first...

Each democratic nation with the Montesquieu Trias Politica separation of powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches of government is advised to create an Economic Supreme Court as a fourth branch. The new UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) falls short of that and will...

Economic policy depends not only on national elections but also on coalition bargaining strategies. In coalition government, minority parties bargain on policy and form a majority coalition, and select a Prime Minister from their mids. In Holland the latter is done conventionally with Plurality,...