Do strong states affect the culture and actions of their citizens in a persistent way? And if so, can the capacity to tax, by itself, drive this effect? I study how the historical capacity of a state to collect taxes affects the decision of citizens to evade the mandatory military draft. I look...

Over time the international development community has advocated various development paradigms, but countries following these paradigms have often performed poorly. I provide an explanation for this poor performance. In my model the political leader of a developing country chooses a policy and...

In the presence of (at least locally) increasing returns to scale tech- nologies, the paper asks the question: does there exist an economic system which implements Pareto efficient allocations and respects the voluntary participation principle? To answer this question, the paper formulates an...

Paper reviews India's growth performance since independence. Phrases suchas "Hindu Rate of Growth," sometimes make a telling comment and expose obscureeconomic data to a wider audience, but they can just as readily obscure reality byfocussing attention on the wrong issue. There is nothing in the...

A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule...

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate whether a variety of behaviors in repeated games are related to an array of individual characteristics that are popular in economics: risk attitude, time preference, trust, trustworthiness, altruism, strategic skills in one-shot matrix games,...

We introduce a novel approach to studying behavior in repeated games - one that is based on the psychology of play. Our approach is based on the following six "aspects" of a player's behavior: round-1 cooperation, lenience, forgiveness, loyalty, leadership, and following. Using a laboratory...

This paper investigates the causal link between voter turnout and policy outcomes related to the size of government. Tax rate and public expenditures are the focal policy outcomes in this study. To capture the causal mechanism, Swedish and Finnish municipal data are used and a constitutional...

The characteristics of endogenously determined sharing rules and the group-size paradox are studied in a model of group contest with the following features: (i) The prize has mixed privatepublic good characteristics. (ii) Groups can differ in marginal cost of effort and their membership size....

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...