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...

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions for France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States using a Markov-switching model that incorporates switching in the monetary policy regime as well as an independent switching process for shifts in the state of the economy....