Which budgetary institutions result in efficient provision of public goods? We analyze a model with two parties bargaining over the allocation to a public good each period. Parties place different values on the public good, and these values may change over time. We model a budgetary institution...

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ in whether public good spending is discretionary...

When do voters win? Democracies have appealing properties, but failures of democracies to produce policies that benefit the voter abound. What conditions determine the success of the unorganized voter who only possess a blunt tool-- the vote-- versus an organized special interest group or firm?...

To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: It can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held, because the wider community is unable to tell whether the...

Policy-making is a dynamic process in which policies can be changed in each period but continue in the absence of new legislation. We study a dynamic legislative bargaining game with an endogenous status quo where in each period a dollar is allocated with a proposal voted against the allocation...

What prevents majorities from extracting surplus from minorities in legislatures? We study an infinite horizon game where a legislative body votes to determine distributive policy each period. Proposals accepted by a simple majority are implemented, otherwise the status quo allocation prevails....

Is there a limit to trade cooperation that the WTO can facilitate? In this paper I present a theory of the WTO in which the WTO is an equilibrium out- come of multiple bilateral repeated prisoners' dilemma games among countries. The equilibrium mimics an important feature of the WTO's Dispute...