The paper tells the story of a pensioner’s fight against a local mafia of Soviet party and government officials and farm managers in a remote rural locality in the 1950s. To Moscow, he was a whistleblower. To the leaders of his local community, he was a troublemaker. Working together, the...

This paper examines whether policy commitment mechanisms, when available, will be used by the elected policymaker in a political-economy equilibrium. We describe a two period repeated voting model where second-period outcomes depend on commitment choices made by an elected policymaker in the...

Military market places display obvious inefficiencies under most arrangements, but the Soviet defense market was unusual for its degree of monopoly, exclusive relationships, intensely scrutinized (in its formative years) by a harsh dictator. This provided the setting for quality versus quantity...

Taxation is only sustainable if the general public complies with it. This observation is uncontroversial with tax practitioners but has been ignored by the public finance tradition, which has interpreted tax constitutions as binding contracts by which the power to tax is irretrievably conferred...

We propose a new cost allocation rule for minimum cost spanning tree games. The new rule is a core selection and also satis…es cost monotonicity. We also give characterization theorems for the new rule as well as the much-studied Bird allocation. We show that the principal di¤erence between...

This paper models interaction between groups of agents by means of a graph where each node represents a group of agents and an arc represents bilateral interaction. It departs from the standard Katz-Shapiro framework by assuming that network benefits are restricted only amongst groups of linked...

We introduce the concept of a parameterized collection of games with limited side payments, ruling out large transfers of utility. Under the assumption that the payoff set of the grand coalition is convex, we show that a game with limited side payments has a nonempty E-core. Our main result is...

The “law of scarcity” is that scarceness is rewarded ; recall, for example, the diamonds and water paradox. In this paper, furthering research initiated in Kelso and Crawford (1982, Econometrica 50, 1483-1504) for matching models, we demonstrate a law of scarcity for cores and approximate...

We introduce the framework of parameterized collections of games with and without side payments and provide three no emptiness of approximate core theorems for games in parameterized collections. The parameters bound (a) the number of approximate types of players and the size of the...

In this paper we investigate whether there is empical evidence that EU Countries set their public expenditure and their taxes interdependently. We use a panel of data across european countries, years and fiscal variables to estimated countries’ reactions functions. We find evidence of...