A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness (Güth and Kliemt, 2013), we derive a bidding mechanism determining...

This paper considers electoral behavior and institutional capture when voters choose between a populist and non-populist politician. Populist politicians provide voters with a utility boom followed by a subsequent bust, as in Dornbusch and Edwards (The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin...

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucrats participate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, but they also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of the total budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbying constitutes a contest among the...

We examine the effect of the interaction between resource rents and democracy on corruption for a panel of 29 Sub-Saharan countries during the period from 1985 to 2007. We find that higher resource rents lead to more corruption and that the effect is significantly stronger in less democratic...

This study shows that the relative size of the youth bulge matters for how corruption affects the internal stability of a political system. We argue that corruption cannot buy political stability (e.g., the greasing hypothesis) in countries with a relatively large youth population. Using panel...

We study bribing in a sequential team contest with multiple pairwise battles. We allow for asymmetries in winning prizes and marginal costs of effort; and we characterize the conditions under which (i) a player in a team is offered a bribe by the owner of the other team and (ii) she accepts the...

We study the role of an enforcer in the effectiveness of selective incentives in solving the collective action problem when groups take part in a contest. Cost functions exhibit constant elasticity of marginal effort costs. If prize valuations are homogeneous, our source of heterogeneity induces...

Diese kleine Arbeit liefert einen vollständigen Überblick über die Möglichkeiten, ökonomische Methoden zur Analyse militärischer Fragen einzusetzen. Entwickelt wird eine Taxonomie von Ansätzen, wobei jeder Ansatz durch ein holzschnittartiges Beispielmodell illustriert wird. Dieses kann...

We study the effect of a corruption reflection index on internal conflict in Iran using a novel measure of corruption based on newspaper coverage. We use the Vector Autoregression (VAR) model and its applied tools of impulse response and variance decomposition analyses to track the response of...

Persistent budget deficits are commonly blamed on irresponsible governments. However, even if the government is fiscally responsible, the agents in charge of implementing the budget may be less concerned about fiscal discipline. According to the survey data analyzed in this paper, such conflicts...