The European Union was created to promote economic, cultural, and regional prosperity. However, the Global Financial Crisis demonstrates that its economic institutions are flawed. While each sovereign state in the Eurozone forfeits the control of its money supply, the lack of a common fiscal...

This paper uses the structure of institutional economics to provide an explanation of the recent U.S. financial crisis. Institutional theory suggests that a county’s political, legal, social, and cultural institutions determine and characterize its economy. An institutional perspective of...

This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a .first-order impact on creative innovations - innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between incremental and radical innovation,...

Schumpeterian growth theory has .operationalized. Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction by developing models based on this concept. These models shed light on several aspects of the growth process that could not be properly addressed by alternative theories. In this survey, we focus on...

In this paper, we propose a unified approach to study participation and voting in multiple elections. The theoretical framework combines an “uncertain-voter” model of turnout with a spatial model of voting behavior. We apply our framework to study turnout and voting in U.S. national...

We propose and estimate a dynamic model of voting with asymmetric information incorporating the three main factors affecting voting choices of individual citizens: party identification, policy preferences, and candidates’ valence. Using individual level data on voting decisions in two...

In this paper we address the following questions: (i) To what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote sincerely testable or falsifiable? And (ii) in environments where the hypothesis is falsifiable, to what extent is the observed behavior of voters consistent with sincere voting? We show that...

In this paper we assess the impact of a variety of policies that may influence the career decisions of members of the U.S. Congress, using the empirical framework of Diermeier, Keane and Merlo (2005). These policies alter incentives to run for re-election, run for higher office or leave...

Two main career paths are prevalent among politicians in modern democracies: there are career politicians (i.e., politicians who work in the political sector until retirement), and political careers (i.e., there are politicians who leave politics before retirement and work in the private...

In this paper we address the following question: To what extent is the hypothesis that voters vote “ideologically” (i.e., they always vote for the candidate who is ideologically “closest” to them) testable or falsifiable? We show that using data only on how individuals vote in a single...