Islamic societies have in contemporary times lagged Western societies in income, growth, and human-development indicators. The supreme values of radical Islam further de-prioritize economic achievement and impose self-deprivation on own populations. This paper investigates the reasons for...

The level of competence that voters attribute to different candidates is an important determinant of election results. In addition, it is observed that some candidates tend to be more ambiguous in their campaigns regarding future plans, while others commit to specific policies. We offer a model...

Terrorism is a tactic much more likely to be used when combatants have asymmetric numerical strength and weaponry. Only if one side is comparatively very weak will it use terror tactics. This weakness requires a means of controlling strong incentives for free-riding or defection from the weaker...

We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors between zero to four from...

Acemoglu and Robinson (2000) argue that historically economic rents have been less successful than political rents in preventing reform and innovation. Contrary to this conclusion I argue that the important margin of distinction for factors preventing deregulation is not whether rents are...

Ronald Coase’s <CitationRef CitationID="CR8">1974</CitationRef> article on lighthouses and the Trinity House case, in particular, has triggered extensive debate on the notion of a public good, but also on the possibility of private production of public goods. The resultant literature has discussed the concept of private property and the...</citationref>

We show that the optimal prize structure of symmetric n-player Tullock tournaments assigns the entire prize pool to the winner, provided that a symmetric pure strategy equilibrium exists. If such an equilibrium fails to exist under the winner-take-all structure, we construct the optimal prize...