This paper analyzes the economic role and performance of a type of financial institution that is observed worldwide: rotating savings and credit associations. Using a model in which individuals save for an indivisible durable consumption good, the authors study rotating savings and credit...

This article exploits data on the pattern of violence across regions and over time to estimate the impact of the peace process in Northern Ireland on house prices. After establishing a negative correlation between killings and house prices, we estimate the parameters of a Markov switching model...

This paper develops a model of the political economy of tax-setting in a multijurisdictional world where voters' choices and incumbent behavior are determined simultaneously. Voters are assumed to make comparisons between jurisdictions to overcome political agency problems. This forces...

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission. This...

This paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies. It extends the citizen-candidate model of democratic policy-making to a dynamic environment. Equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that, in each period, conditional on future policies...

This paper argues that the possibility of bailouts to financial intermediaries distorts the supply price of capital and creates an argument for taxing financial bonuses separately from other sources of income. We develop a model of financial contracting where intermediaries compete for workers...