Data envelopment analysis is used to analyze the efficiency of candidate campaign spending. Analysis of the measured efficiency scores of the incumbents and challengers shows that there are significant systematic effects of both district and candidate characteristics. The incumbent's residuals...

The literature on the effects of campaign expenditures on electoral outcomes implicitly suggests that incumbent spending cannot have a negative marginal impact on the incumbent's vote share. Indeed, that literature has spent a great deal of effort finding positive and significant effects of...

Mancur Olson's institutional sclerosis hypothesis may be evident in the effects of interest groups on investment in physical capital. To test this proposition, we use cross sectional data on 42 countries for which information on the number of interest groups is available to estimate the effect...

The literature on the effects of campaign expenditures on electoral outcomes implicitly suggests that incumbent spending cannot have a negative marginal impact on the incumbent's vote share. Indeed, that literature has spent a great deal of effort finding positive and significant effects of...

Experimental work in economics has long focussed attention on strategic interaction amongst individuals. A robust result is that a large fraction of participants in public-goods experiments act cooperatively. This paper tests for the extent of strategic behavior in a nonlaboratory setting. These...