Natural resources are generally associated to negative effects on the political environment of a country. This paper explores the impact that oil revenues have on the establishment of a given political system. Based on previous literature, a political economy perspective is employed. A simple...

We study the group stability of collective decision making when society is organized according to a non directed graph, and groups' payoff possibilities are given by a partition function. We focus on the stability properties of hierarchical organizations, formally described by minimally...

Community enforcement is an important device for sustaining efficiency in some repeated games of cooperation. We investigate cooperation when information about players' reputations spreads to their future partners through links in a social network that connects them. We find that information...

We adopt the largest consistent set defined by Chwe [J. of Econ. Theory 63 (1994), 299-235] to predict which coalition structures are possibly stable when players are farsighted. We also introduce a refinement, the largest cautious consistent set, based on the assumption that players are...

Limited borrower information may create targeting distortions in credit markets. Community-based lending programs may reduce these distortions by exploiting information transmitted in local networks, but connections may create asymmetries in power. This paper analyzes how local leaders balance...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...

The paper investigates the determinants of ethnic heterogeneity of the Italian provinces. Among other factors, the paper tests empirically whether gradual improvements in distant communication boost the generation of ethnically heterogeneous provinces. Consequently to easier communication,...