The paper considers a two-tier institution in which government provides public services, but individuals can opt out of public provision (but not taxes). Funding for the public service is chosen endogenously by majority vote, and we first provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a...

We study whether using prosocial incentives, where effort is tied directly to charitable contributions, may lead to better performance than standard incentive schemes. In a real-effort task, individuals indeed work harder for charity than for themselves, but only when incentive stakes are low....

In a team project with significant complementarities between various players' individual tasks, news of early success by some encourages others to push ahead with their own tasks while lack of success has the opposite effect. This ex-post disparity in incentives created gives rise to two...

We examine how formal and informal contract enforcing institutions interact in a competitive market with asymmetric information where consumers do not observe quality before purchase. Firm level incentives for producing high quality can be achieved with an informal enforcement mechanism,...

We document whether and how publicizing a public procurement auction causally affects entry and the costs of procurement. We run a regression discontinuity design analysis on a large database of Italian procurement auctions. Auctions with a value above the threshold must be publicized in the...

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...

Using data on federal outlays and U.S. House elections, I estimate the effect of the pork barrel on the quality of officeholders, taking into account the fact that seniority creates a dynamic linkage across periods. After estimating the parameters governing the influence of seniority on federal...

We compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions: all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agrees on the direction of harmonization. This type of...

This paper analyzes political agency with endogenous information collection and revelation by third-party auditors. While increasing incentives for auditors to provide information straightforwardly improves political control, a small amount of pro-incumbent bias can also be useful for...

This paper provides a theoretical model for the coattail effect, where a popular candidate for one branch of government attracts votes to candidates from the same political party for other branches of government. I assume a political agency framework with moral hazard in order to analyze the...