We study how cultural distance affects the rejection of imposed institutions. To this purpose, we exploit the transplantation of Piedmontese institutions on Southern Italy which occurred during the Italian unification. We assemble a novel and unique dataset containing information on episodes of...

We study how cultural distance affects the rejection of imposed institutions. To do so, we exploit the transplantation of Piedmontese institutions on Southern Italy that occurred during the Italian unification. We assemble a novel and unique dataset containing municipal-level information on...

We construct an equilibrium model of party competition, in which parties are especially concerned with their core and swing voters, concerns which American political scientists have focused upon in their attempts to understand party behavior in general elections.Parties compete on a large policy...

Three vote-share equations are estimated and analyzed in this paper, one for presidential elections, one for on-term House elections, and one for mid-term House elections. The sample period is 1916-2006. Considering the three equations together allows one to test whether the same economic...

The timing of elections is flexible in many countries. We study this optimization, by first creating a Bayesian learning model of a mean-reverting political support process. We then explore optimal electoral timing, modeling it as a renewable American option with interacting waiting and stopping...

We assess the capacity of gerrymandering to undermine the will of the people in a representative democracy. Citizens have political positions represented on a spectrum, and electoral maps separate people into districts. We show that unrestrained gerrymandering can severely distort the...

We analyze games of incomplete information and offer equilibrium predictions which are valid for, and in this sense robust to, all possible private information structures that the agents may have. We completely characterize the set of Bayes correlated equilibria in a class of games with...

We define a notion of correlated equilibrium for games with incomplete information in a general setting with finite players, finite actions, and finite states, which we call Bayes correlated equilibrium. The set of Bayes correlated equilibria of a fixed incomplete information game equals the set...

We analyze games of incomplete information and offer equilibrium predictions which are valid for all possible private information structures that the agents may have. Our characterization of these robust predictions relies on an epistemic result which establishes a relationship between the set...