If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on effcient policies especially in hard times. Political leaders’actions are bound by a “conformity constraint”that requires...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times. Political leaders' actions are bound by a "conformity constraint" that requires them...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, the country leaders may fi…nd it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times. The conformity constraint -political leaders unwillingness or impossibility to depart from these norms -...

World democracies widely differ in electoral rules, as well as in legislative, executive or legal institutions. Different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power. We explore how these mappings affect voters' participation to an...

If citizens of different countries belonging to an economic union adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on efficient policies, especially in hard times. Political leaders’ actions are bound to express...

We study direct democracy with population uncertainty. Voters' participation is often among the desiderata by the election designer. A participation quorum is a threshold on the fraction of participating voters below which the status quo is kept. We show that participation quorums produce...

We develop a dynamic political economy model in which invest- ment in the state capacity to levy taxes and deter crime is a policy variable, and we study the evolution of state capacity when policy is chosen by an elite. We show that democratization in the sense of ex- pansion of the elite leads...

Credit booms seem to be among the main predictors of financial crises. We find that, in emerging economies, political booms measured by increases in incumbents' popularity are important predictors too, not only of financial crises but of economic crises more generally. We propose a model in...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...