We analyze the impact of elected competitors from the same constituency on legislative shirking in the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2017. The German electoral system ensures that there is always at least one federal legislator per constituency with a varying number of elected competitors from...

Organised crime tightens its corrupting influence on politics through violent intimidation. Anti-crime measures that increase the cost of corruption but not of the exercise of violence might accordingly lead mafia-style organizations to retaliate by resorting to violence in lieu of bribery. On...

Organized crime reinforces its corrupting influence on politics through violent intimidation. Anti-crime measures that increase the cost of corruption but not of the exercise of violence might accordingly lead mafia-style organizations to retaliate by resorting to violence in lieu of bribery. On...

The G20 has emerged as a premier deliberative forum, involving leaders of some of the largest, systematically important countries of the world. Over the years, the G20 agenda has evolved to include pertinent issues for both developed countries and the emerging market economies. After the G20...

When Covid-19 was declared as a pandemic, countries administered lockdowns and stimulus packages were announced to address the deteriorating situation. For implementing these packages, routine control measures were simplified and often relaxed. The G20 countries were quick to react by...

Political involvement in the operation of an enterprise, whether it is private or state owned, creates opportunities for interest groups to influence the allocation of resources. Resource allocation transfers rent both between unions and private owners within the firm and between these organized...

We address the problem of choosing a portfolio of policies under "deep uncertainty." We introduce the idea of belief dominance as a way to derive a set of non-dominated portfolios and robust individual alternatives. Our approach departs from the tradition of providing a single recommended...

Gino Gancia, Giacomo Ponzetto and Jaume Ventura have written an extremely interesting paper on a topic that is very timely for the global economy. In this article, I will first argue that GPV have succeeded in formalizing their hypothesis, and that while providing very suggestive analytical...

A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers some alternative to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding...