By downplaying externalities, magnifying the cost of moral behavior, or suggesting not being pivotal, exculpatory narratives can allow individuals to maintain a positive image when in fact acting in a morally questionable way. Conversely, responsibilizing narratives can help sustain better...

We study the political economy of policy innovations during the U.S. welfare reform in 1996. Specifically, we investigate how reputation concerns among governors influence the decision to experiment with welfare policies. In line with a political agency model, our empirical results suggest that...

This paper focuses on indivisible multiple-cost-single-benefit projects that must be approved by the government. A simple mechanism is proposed that ensures an efficient and fair implementation of such projects. The proposed mechanism is appropriate for a unilateral information structure: the...

Political corruption is a concern of many modern democracies. It weakens democraticinstitutions, restricts public services, and lowers productivity undermining economicdevelopment. Yet despite its importance, our understanding of what determines corruption islimited. This paper uses a novel...

Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the "psychology and economics" of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which...

Political corruption is a concern of many modern democracies. It weakens democratic institutions, restricts public services, and lowers productivity undermining economic development. Yet despite its importance, our understanding of what determines corruption is limited. This paper uses a novel...

We examine how overall delivery of public goods (i.e., efficiency) is affected by affirmative action in elections, i.e., restricting candidate entry in elections to one population group. We argue that when group identities are salient, such restrictions on candidate entry need not necessarily...

This paper presents a model and experimental evidence to explain the "volunteering puzzle" where agents prefer volunteering time to donating money when monetary donations are, ceteris paribus, more efficient for providing resources to charity. In the model agents receive heterogeneous utility...

This paper examines whether access to information enhances political accountability. Based upon the results of Brazil's recent anti-corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally-transferred funds, it estimates the effects of the disclosure of local government...

We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the...