When considered as a unified project, the Ostroms' themes of polycentricity, self-governance, and the art and science of association have strong intellectual roots and connections with Austrian economics. In this paper, we show the close relationship between the Ostroms and the Austrians. We...

James Scott has written a detailed ethnography on the lives of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia who choose to escape oppressive government by living at the edge of their civilization. To the political economist the fascinating story told by Scott provides useful narratives in need of...

We model two-candidate elections in which 1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and 2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare political campaigns with truthful advertising to campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive...

In 1903 the Italian economist Amilcare Puviani articulated a theory of fiscal illusion to promote better understanding of the course of political action. Puviani created his theory to explain the failure of political pronouncements to reflect the reality to which those pronouncements claimed to...

Public choice theory was initiated by economists and political scientists in the late-1950s and early 1960s and is generally described as the application of economic concepts and formulations to political phenomena. This essay explains that economizing action and public choice are universal...

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...

In addition to using physical walls the United States government has attempted to restrict movement across the U.S.-Mexico border by constructing “virtual walls.” Virtual walls involve applying advanced surveillance and detection technologies to border enforcement. The U.S. government has...

I study the link between the choice of rule-based contracts and political competition through the municipal bond market. I provide evidence that when the probability of losing office is high, mayors are more likely to issue revenue bonds over general obligation bonds and to choose competitive...

We develop a simple model of collective experimentation and take it to the lab. In equilibrium, as in the recent work of Strulovici (2010), majority rule has a bias toward under-experimentation, as good news for a minority of voters may lead a majority of voters to abandon a policy when each of...

This paper surveys research of lab experiments on voting games, focusing on six areas that have received much attention in the last few decades: (i) costly voting in elections with two alternatives; (ii) (other) collective action problems; (iii) elections with more than two alternatives; (iv)...