The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from...

We study the interactions between capital income tax and social security privatization in the context of rising longevity. In an economy with idiosyncratic income shocks, redistributive defined benefit social security provides some insurance against income uncertainty. This insurance comes at...

We study the interaction between competitive markets that produce large but unequally distributed welfare gains and elections through which the poor majority can redistribute income away from the rich minority. In our simple laboratory democracy, subjects first earn their income by trading in a...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

The ability of groups to implement efficiency-enhancing institutions is emerging as a central theme of research in economics. This paper explores voting on a scheme of intergroup competition which facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma situation. Experimental results show that the...

Institutions are an important means for fostering prosocial behaviors, but in many contexts their scope is limited and they govern only a subset of all socially desirable acts. We use a laboratory experiment to study how the presence and nature of an institution that enforces prosocial behavior...

In this article, we empirically study the survival of the ruling party in parliamentary democracies using a hazard rate model. We define survival of a crisis as being successful in a critical vote in the parliament. We develop a general probabilistic model of political crises and test it...

We study fiscal devaluation in a small-open economy with labor market search frictions. Our analysis shows the key role of both dimensions in shaping the optimal tax scheme. By reducing labor market distortions, the tax reform is welfare-improving. Yet, as it makes imports more expensive, fiscal...

This paper uses an overlapping generations model with international labor mobility and a politically responsive fiscal policy to examine aging in developed and developing regions. Migrant workers change the political structure composed of young and elderly voters in both labor-receiving and...