This paper is the first attempt to study the relationship between public auditor expertise and fiscal performance. I find that states requiring the auditor to hold a professional degree feature significantly higher credit ratings and lower expenditures and debt.

The paper studies the design of popular initiatives in unions of states. We analyze the effect of state-specific threshold requirements on the incentives of a rational campaign organizer who decides which constituencies to target. If the heterogeneity of preferences in a population increases...

This paper finds evidence that more democratic political institutions increase trust. Second generation immigrants with ancestries from 115 countries are studied within 30 European countries. Comparing individuals born and residing in the same country, those whose father was born in a more...

The Condorcet rule on the domain of profiles at which there exists a unique Condorcet winner is the unique rule satisfying anonymity, neutrality, and strategy-proofness.

The restart effect occurs in linear voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) experiments when there is an upward pulse in contributions to the group account following a stoppage and then restarting of the VCM experiment. Although the restart effect is a well-known empirical regularity little...

We study a model of strategic persuasion based on the theory of cheap talk, in which a better-informed agent manipulates two decision-makers’ joint decision on alternative proposals. With the heterogeneity of two decision-makers’ value of the outside option, only the decision-maker with the...

The universally beneficial manipulation conjecture of Campbell and Kelly states that for a social choice rule, if everyone gains as a result of any optimal manipulation, then the rule satisfies universally beneficial manipulation, i.e., everyone gains as a result of any manipulation, optimal or...

We elicit human conditional punishment types by conducting experiments. We find that their punishment decisions to an individual are on average significantly positively proportional to other members’ punishment decisions to that individual.

This paper models the data generating process of common value auctions in a parameter-estimation way, known as the classical approach in statistical inference. Viewing the true value of the object as a parameter that nobody ever knows, we let our value function be the average of the individual...

We study the general problem of public choice. We consider environments where agents’ identities may not be observable. A “rule” associates a preference profile with an alternative. An agent may create fictitious identities and submit multiple preference relations under them. We study...