Many developing countries have suffered under the personal rule of kleptocrats', who implement highly inefficient economic policies, expropriate the wealth of their citizens, and use the proceeds for their own glorification or consumption. We argue that the success of kleptocrats rests, in part,...

Because of their more limited inequality and more comprehensive social welfare systems, many perceive average welfare to be higher in Scandinavian societies than in the United States. Why then does the United States not adopt Scandinavian-style institutions? More generally, in an interdependent...

We develop a model of the political consequences of public income volatility. As is standard, political incentives create inefficient policies, but we show that making income uncertain creates specific new effects. Future volatility reduces the benefit of being in power, making policy more...

Recent theories of the Long Divergence between Middle Eastern and Western European economies focus on Middle Eastern (over-)reliance on religious legitimacy, use of slave soldiers, and persistence of restrictive proscriptions of religious (Islamic) law. These theories take as exogenous the...

In this paper we survey recent advances in the economic theory of cultural transmission. We highlight three main themes on which the literature has made great progress in the last ten years: the domain of traits subject to cultural transmission, the micro-foundations for the technology of...

In this chapter we survey recent advances in modeling cultural transmission in the economics literature. We first present the basic canonical model of the evolution of cultural traits in the social sciences. Both Economics and Evolutionary anthropology build on this canonical model but their...

We build a model of online behavioral manipulation driven by AI advances. A platform dynamically offers one of n products to a user who slowly learns product quality. User learning depends on a product's "glossiness,' which captures attributes that make products appear more attractive than they...

We investigate the short- and long-term effects of a natural gas boom in an economy where energy can be produced with coal, natural gas, or clean sources and the direction of technology is endogenous. In the short run, a natural gas boom reduces carbon emissions by inducing substitution away...

Building on theories of international relations, we analyze how mistrust (uncertainty about an adversary's preferences or capabilities), misperception (imperfect observation of an adversary's actions), and misunderstanding (non-degenerate higher-order beliefs) can lead to conflict and drive its...