We theoretically and experimentally study voter behavior in a setting characterized by plurality rule and mandatory voting, where voters choose from three options. We are interested in the occurrence of strategic voting in an environment where Condorcet cycles may occur. In particular, we focus...

Many seasonal macroeconomic time series are subject to changes in their means and variances over a long time horizon. In this paper we propose a general treatment for the modelling of time-varying features in economic time series. We show that time series models with mean and variance functions...

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

Families often play a significant role in representative democracies. In this paper, we test the extent to which dynastic and non-dynastic leaders differ in their policy making. Our empirical analysis focuses on local politics in Italy, using a large sample of mayors and mayoral candidates in...

This paper studies the political economy of cordon tolls in a monocentric city consisting of three zones: center, mid-city and suburbs. The cordon toll may give rise to several interrelated conflicts: between residents within and outside the cordon, between car and public transport users,...

If people understand that some macroeconomic policies are unsustainable, why would they vote for them in the first place? We develop a political economy theory of the endogenous emergence of fiscal crises, based on the idea that the adjustment mechanism to a crisis favors some social groups,...

This article generalises the results of Saïdi and Zakoian (2006) to a considerably larger class of nonlinear ARCH models with discontinuities, leverage effects and robust news impact curves. We propose a new method of proof for the existence of a strictly stationary and phi-mixing solution....

This paper investigates the degree of persistence of market fear. Specifically, two different long-memory approaches (R/S analysis with the Hurst exponent method and fractional integration) are used to analyse persistence of the VIX index over the sample period 2004-2016, as well as some...

A major contribution of the public-choice school is the recognition by Gordon Tullock that contestable rents give rise to social losses because of unproductive resource use. Contestable rents usually are politically assigned privileges. Contestable rents can also be found outside of government...

We estimate a Markow-switching dynamic factor model with three states based on six leading business cycle indicators for Germany preselected from a broader set using the Elastic Net soft-thresholding rule. The three states represent expansions, normal recessions and severe recessions. We show...