Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...

There is a strong evidence that most of financial variables are better described by a combination of difusion and jump processes. Considering such evidence, researchers have studied security market models with jumps, in particular, in the context of option pricing. In most of their models, jump...

We study a theoretical general equilibrium environment in which the only activity of interest is armed robbery. Agents choose whether to be citizens or robbers, and whether to purchase handguns. Armed citizens can protect themselves from robbery but any armed agent runs the risk of accidentally...

This paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending, taxation and debt. Policy choices are made by a legislature consisting of representatives elected by geographically-defined districts. The legislature can raise revenues via a distortionary income tax and by borrowing....

This paper introduces new core and Walrasian equilibrium notions for an asymmetric information economy with non-expected utility preferences. We prove existence and incentive compatibility results for the new notions we introduce.

What is the effect of ambiguity aversion on trade? Although in a Bewley's model ambiguity aversion always lead to less trade, in other models this is not always true. However, we show that if the endowments are unambiguous then more ambiguity aversion implies less trade, for a very general class...