Economic growth and poverty reduction require for a country to establish efficient rules for economic and political transactions. Poor countries suffer from inadequate, inefficient transaction rules. Formal rules (e.g., laws, policies) must be nested in hospitable behavioural norms and values....

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

We test the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between short-term temptation to be selfish and better judgment to act pro-socially. Using a dictator game and a public goods game, we manipulated the likelihood that individuals identified self-control conflict, and...

Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians? incentives to behave opportunistically increase with...

We examine whether it is socially beneficial for the individual voting records of central bank council members to be published when the general public is unsure about central bankers' efficiency and central bankers are aiming for re-election. We show that publication is initially harmful since...

In this paper, we present a model in which the performing arts are modelled as congestible public goods. In accordance with empirical evidence, the production of seat capacity is assumed to be subject to fixed costs. We estimate the parameters of the model's demand and cost functions using...

Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which social engineering is more or less likely to...

We augment a standard tax model by concerns about tax equity: people get upset when labour is taxed more heavily than capital. Even the slightest concern for tax equity invalidates the common recommendation for small open economies that capital should remain tax-exempt. This holds for exogenous...

Many economic and social situations can be represented by a digraph. Both axiomatic and iterativemethods to determine the strength or power of all the nodes in a digraph have been proposed inthe literature. We propose a new method, where the power of a node is determined by both thenumber of its...