Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

Natural-resource taxation and investment exhibit cycles in a vast number of countries, driving political turmoil and power shifts. Using a rational-expectations model, we show cycles result from governments' inability to commit to future taxes and firms' inability to credibly exit a country...

Traditional power indices ignore preferences and strategic interaction. Equilibrium analysis of particular non-cooperative decision procedures is unsuitable for normative analysis and assumes typically unavailable information. These points drive a lingering debate about the right approach to...

The Homo economicus of traditional economics is far from being completely self-interested, rational, or as individualistic as he is purported to be; he will haggle to death over price but will not take what he wants by force. Implicitly, he is assumed to behave ruthlessly within a welldefined...

We consider a general equilibrium model where groups operating in a competitive market environment can have several members and make efficient collective consumption decisions. Individuals have the option to leave the group and make it on their own or join another group. We study the effect of...

This paper proposes a difference-in-differences approach for disentangling a total treatment effect on some outcome into a direct impact as well as an indirect effect operating through a binary intermediate variable - or mediator - within strata defined upon how the mediator reacts to the...

We study lobbying behavior by firms in a two-region economy, with either centralized or decentralized provision of profit-enhancing local public goods. Firms compete either in the market, lobbying for public good provision once entered in a market, or for the market, lobbying to gain ccess to...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful codecision makers , understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

For a panel of 122 cities observed over 300 years in medieval northern-central Italy, we document that the occurrence of an earthquake retarded institutional transition from the feudal regime to the commune (free city state) in cities where the political and the religious leaders were one and...