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...

Do elections allow voters to express their policy preferences, with change in government spending patterns following the election of a new leader? How long does it take for the composition of government spending to change following a change in leadership? Or, do significant spending changes...

I propose a framework in which individual political participation can take two distinct forms, voting and contributing resources to campaigns, in a context in which the negligible impact of any individual's actions on aggregate outcomes is fully recognized by all agents. I then use the framework...

We consider a political agency model where voters learn information about some policy-relevant variable, which they can ignore when it impedes their desire to hold optimistic beliefs. Voters' excessive tendency to sustain optimism may result in inefficient political decision-making because...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support the provision of public goods has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable of either resolving or...

The paper studies a federal system where (a) a region provides non-contractible inputs into the social benefits from a public policy project with spillovers to other regions, and (b) where political bargaining between different levels of government may ensure efficient decision making ex post....

Public school systems generally use one of the three competing mechanisms – the Boston mechanism, the deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycle mechanism – for assigning students to specific schools. Although the literature generally claims that the Boston mechanism is Pareto...

We assess the effect of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws on public corruption in the United States. Specifically, we investigate the impact of switching from a weak to a strong state-level FOIA law on corruption convictions of state and local government officials. The evidence suggests...

This article studies how social insurance programs shape individual's incentives to take up registered employment and to report earnings to the tax authorities. The analysis is based on a social insurance reform in Uruguay that extended healthcare coverage to the dependent children of registered...

We analyze how corruption affects incentives to invest or contribute to public goods. We obtain a proxy for corruption among Liberian community leaders by keeping track of a flow of inputs associated with a development intervention, measuring these inputs before and after giving them in custody...