What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

We construct a tractable endogenous growth model with production externalities in which the public capital stock augments investment specific technological change. We characterize the first best fiscal policy and show that there exist several labor and capital tax-subsidy combinations that...