"Much economic policy is deliberately shifted away from direct political processes to administrative processes - political pressure deflection. Pressure deflection poses a puzzle to standard political economy models which suggest that having policies to sell is valuable to politicians. The...

"Economic theory developed in the prior literature indicates that under the joint and several liability imposed by the federal Superfund statute, the government should recover more of its costs of cleaning up contaminated sites than it would under nonjoint liability, and the amount recovered...

"Both conventional wisdom and leading academic research view pork barrel spending as antithetical to responsible policymaking in times of crisis. In this paper we present an alternative view. When agents are heterogeneous in their ideology and in their information about the economic situation,...