There is a growing literature on the phenomenon of dynasties in democracies, with most studies indicating a causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation under candidate-centered electoral systems. In this study, we explore the relationship between the incumbency advantage and dynasties in...

We consider a committee voting setup with two rounds of voting where committee members who possess private information about the state of the world have to make a binary decision. We investigate incentives for truthful revelation of their information in the first voting period. Coughlan (2000)...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

We test the theory of expressive voting in relation to political ideology in a laboratory experiment. After deriving our hypotheses from a decision theoretic model, we examine voting decisions in an experiment in which we use the size of the electorate as the treatment variable. Using a Heckman...

Countries around the world are facing important challenges to the sustainability of their pension systems. Changing policies, especially those of large scope and financial magnitude, is a political challenge. It takes a combination of willingness, capacity and enough political support to change...

This paper analyzes local political cycle in Czech municipalities over the period between 1997 and 2013. We apply the system GMM and the difference GMM estimators to identify distortion in current and capital expenditures per capita in electoral and pre-electoral years, while focusing on various...

This study relies on a recent reform introducing gubernatorial term limits at the Portuguese local level to explore how an exogenous variation in eligibility for re-election affects local fiscal policy choices. Relying on electoral and fiscal outcomes for the past three complete electoral terms...

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous `disagreement value'. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under...

In Binary Threshold Public Good (BTPG) games players contribute or not to the production of a public good which is produced if and only if there are "enough" contributors. There is a plethora of equilibria in BTPG games. We experimentally test general theoretical attributes of equilibria and...

Drawing broadly on the literature on the political economy of the financial crisis, the paper looks at deregulation as a market driven process that culminated in a collective action failure. In the run up to the 2008 Financial Crisis strong competition and moral hazard went hand in hand and that...