This paper questions the link between the establishment of a common currency among several countries and the necessity of political coordination. It begins by discussing why conducting a single monetary policy is thought to be easier within a single political unit. It then proceeds to enquire...

We develop a competitive equilibrium theory of a market for votes. Before voting on a binary issue, individuals may buy and sell their votes with each other. We define the concept of Ex Ante Vote-Trading Equilibrium, identify weak sufficient conditions for existence, and construct one such...

Administrative and political reorganization is being actively debated even in the mature, stable economies of Western Europe. This paper investigates the possibility of such reorganization being tied to the integration of economic markets. The paper describes the equilibrium of a game where...

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets’ potential to take over functions typically performed by networks of personal connections. First among them is the reliable transmission of information. In this paper we begin from a model of labour markets where social ties are stronger...

This paper studies the effect of foreign aid on economic stabilization. Following Alesina and Drazen (1991), we model the delay in stabilizing as the result of a distributional struggle: reforms are postponed because they are costly and each distributional faction hopes to reduce its share of...

Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use;...

Two countries adopting a common currency share the same monetary policy and save on transaction costs. This paper studies the impact of these two factors on the composition of markets. The establishment of a monetary union alters the boundaries between domestic and international markets and...

The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions. By cumulating votes on issues that it deems most...

Incomplete information in the international market creates difficulty in matching agents with productive opportunities and interferes with the ability of prices to allocate scarce resources across countries. Resource-price differentials may not be eliminated and domestic resource supplies may...

When countries of different sizes participate in a cooperative agreement, the potential gain from deviation determines the minimum power that each country requires in the common decision-making. This paper studies the problem in the context of a common currency, which requires coordination of...