Consider an environment such as a political election where a principal requires the completion of multiple tasks, but an agent can only be rewarded with a hire/fire decision rather than an endogenously chosen monetary payment. When the principal hires a single agent to perform multiple tasks,...

We apply Leeson and Dean’s (2009) method for studying democratic dominoes to capitalist spillovers to compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. We find that capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate.

With nondistortionary user charges, the first best and second best of a single-club-exogenous-income economy with identical individuals coincide. They differ if incomes differ. Overprovision of a superior club good then occurs in the Second Best.

It is shown that rent-seeking contests with continuous and independent type distributions possess a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.

We study the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict at the subnational level using a panel dataset of 5689 administrative regions from 53 African countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2010. We find that economic shocks, measured by nighttime light intensity and instrumented by...

Trendsetters wish to be perceived as the type that defines normative behavior. Incorporating norm formation in Bernheim (1994)’s model yields equilibria with social considerations concentrating behavior, allowing multiple conformist pools. Refinements link each pooling equilibrium to a unique...

We study the stability of decision making in committees. A policy proposal introduced by a committee member is either adopted or abandoned in favor of a new proposal after deliberations. If a proposal is abandoned, it is in spite of the committee member who introduced it, who does not cooperate...

We propose an evolutionary game to analyse the dynamics of tolerance among heterogeneous economic agents. We show that: (i) intolerance is much more persistent than tolerance; (ii) a fully tolerant society assures prosperity; (iii) cultural integration should precede economic integration.

In Uttar Pradesh, teams of four are engaged to dig soil under the NREGA programme. In one treatment spouses work together; in the other treatment they work in separate teams. Working with spouses is associated with significantly higher output.

Collective household models posit that each household member has access to a fraction of the household budget, called a resource share, which defines the shadow budget faced by a household member. Together with the within-household shadow price vector, the shadow budget determines the material...