We extend the theory of common agency to the situation where the principals' payoffs are affected by their "ex ante" expectations of the agent's "ex post" choice. We show how the usual truthful schedules must be modified to account for the rational expectations constraint. We apply the model to...

This paper looks at the consequences of introducing employment adjustment costs into two standard models of trade unions--the right-to-manage model and the efficient-bargain model. The authors look at how unions affect both the speed of adjustment to equilibrium and the long-run equilibrium....

This paper presents a two-party model of fiscal and debt policy in which the parties do not care about policy outcomes when out of office. Unlike other models of this type, the authors' model has predictions that are largely consistent with existing empirical findings about partisan and...

Tax competition theory predicts that the introduction of the EU Single Market in 1993 should have caused excise tax competition and thus increased strategic interaction in the setting of excise taxes among EU countries. We test this prediction using a panel data set of 12 EU countries over the...

The authors extend the "rational partisan" model of inflation to allow for the effects of unemployment persistence on the dynamics of inflation. The authors combine this model with the "exchange-rate-regime" model of inflation, and examine the experience of the United Kingdom. Outside the fixed...