International carbon markets are frequently propagated as an efficient instrument for reducing CO2 emissions. We argue that such markets, despite their desirable efficiency properties, might not be in the best interest of governments who are guided by strategic considerations in negotiations. We...

Violent conflict destroy resources. It generates "destruction costs." These costs have an important effect on individual's decisions to cooperate or conflict. We develop two models of conflict: one in which conflict's destruction costs are independent of individuals' investment in "arms" - the...

The premise of this paper is that economic progress is made possible through discoveries, learning, and creation of skills or knowledge, rather than by accumulation of capital. It is argued that science is a systematic inquiry that is categorically different from pre-scientific stage of useful...

This paper presents new evidence on how demography affects democratic attitudes in Western democracies. Using individual survey responses, the empirical analysis disentangles age from cohort patterns and other contemporaneous economic and political influences that shape democratic attitudes. The...

Some of today's most heated policy debates about Brexit, trade wars, climate change abatement, and migration involve redistribution of resources within a given country (national redistribution) and between countries (global redistribution). Nevertheless, theories and evidence on preferences for...

We consider a canonical two-period model of elections with adverse selection (hidden preferences) and moral hazard (hidden actions), in which neither voters nor politicians can commit to future choices. We prove existence of electoral equilibria, and we show that office holders mix between...

This paper studies whether political budget cycles occur in public procurement in the European Union. Using project- level data from Tenders Electronic Daily (2008-2018), I analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the...

This paper studies the existence of election cycles in public procurement in the European Union for the national level. We analyze different steps along the procurement process, namely the publication of the contract notice, the awarding of the contract, and the project completion. We point out...

We study the interaction of climate policies and investments into fossil and renewable energy generation capacity if policies are set by democratically elected governments and can lead to stranded assets. We develop an overlapping generations model, where elections determine carbon taxation and...