Citizens political participation to protests is a crucial issue for any political system, whether democratic or autocratic. Political systems have different ways of dealing with citizens' protests, determining cost and benefit of public dissent, responding to public requests and allowing...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

In this paper we consider a deterministic complete information two groups contest where the effort choices made by the teammates are aggregated into group performance by the weakest-link technology (perfect complementarity), that is a "max-min group contest", as defined by Chowdhury et al....

We study effort provision and incentivisation in a Tullock group-contest with m ≥ 2 groups that differ in size. A novel algorithmic procedure is presented that, under a symmetry assumption, explicitly characterises the equilibrium. Endogenous, optimal incentivisation schemes are then...

This article determines the conditions under which the Southern countries should act together, or separately, while negotiating with the North about climate change policy and about the conditions for future Southern engagement. The paper models the international negotiations with complete and...

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...

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...

This paper aims to explain the rise and fall of communism by exploring the interplay between economic incentives and social preferences in different economic systems. We introduce inequality-averse and inefficiency-averse agents responding to economic incentives and transmitting their ideology...

The paper investigates determinants of investments in state capacity and institutional change in contemporary Ukraine. After formulating a simple sequential two-stage model of investments in state capacity, the paper estimates autoregressive distributed lag and vector autoregressive models to...