Financial Secretary Stephen Timms considers Labour’s response to the financial crisis and looks forward to what his party is doing to secure the recovery.[...]

This paper develops an approach to political equilibrium in a two-party setting. The approach characterizes political resource allocationas trading o¤ the utility of core party supporters and swing voters,i.e. those who are not attached to either party. The model has threestages. First parties...

A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability structures put in place to select public officials. While the principle that legislators are to be elected is now a defining feature of modern democracies, there are some offices where a plurality of selection methods survive. A key...

We present a simple theory of the quality (competence and honesty) of elected officials. Our theoryoffers three main insights. Low-quality citizens have a ‘comparative advantage’ in pursuing electiveoffice, because their market wages are lower than those of high-quality citizens...

Why is social exclusion a problem? What about ‘voluntary’ social exclusion –when an individual chooses to exclude him or herself from the wider society?Brain Barry has addressed these questions in a recent CASE book, arguing thatsocial exclusion, voluntary or involuntary, offends against...

Manski [13] proposed an approach for dealing with a particular form respondentuncertainty in discrete choice settings, particularly relevant in survey based researchwhen the uncertainty stems from the incomplete description of the choice scenarios.Specically, he suggests eliciting choice...

In the 40’s and early 50’ two decision theories were proposed and have since dominated the sceneof the fascinating field of decision-making. In 1944 – when von Neumann and Morgenstern showedthat if preferences are consistent with a set of axioms then it is possible to represent these...