Manipulation of government finances for the benefit of narrowly defined groups is usually thought to be limited to the part of the budget over which politicians exercise discretion in the short run, such as earmarks. Analyzing a revenue-sharing program between the central and local governments...

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 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...

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...

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...

We analyze the effects of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians, as measured by the average number of years of education. We consider an Italian law which introduced gender quotas in local elections in 1993, and was abolished in 1995. As not...

We investigate the efficiency of Coasean bargaining when restrictions are placed on the set of feasible bargaining outcomes. When property rights are costly to (defend) appropriate, we find that bargaining restrictions may be Pareto superior to unconstrained voluntary exchange. Under cost...