The use of moral appeals to affect the behavior of others is pervasive (from the pulpit to ethics classes) but little is known about the effects of moral suasion on behavior. In a series of experiments we study whether moral suasion affects behavior in voluntary contribution games and mechanisms...

We study political dynasties in the United States Congress since its inception in 1789. We document historic and geographic patterns in the evolution and profile of political dynasties, study the extent of dynastic bias in legislative politics versus other occupations, and analyze the connection...

Political dynasties have long been present in democracies, raising concerns that inequality in the distribution of political power may reflect imperfections in democratic representation. However, the persistence of political elites may simply reflect differences in ability or political vocation...

"We present a model where a long run player is allowed to use both money transfers and threats to influence the decisions of a sequence of short run players. We show that threats might be used credibly (even in arbitrarily short repeated games) by a long-lived player who gains by developing a...

We offer a simple general equilibrium model to analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e. shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) will affect the intensity of social conflict over the distribution of resources. Examples of conflict activities range from crime to civil war. We show that...