Interest groups can influence political decisions in two distinct ways: by offering contributions to political actors and by providing them with relevant information that is advantageous for the group. We analyze the conditions under which interest groups are more inclined to use one or the...

We use survey responses by firms to examine the firm-level determinants and effects of political influence, their perception of corruption and prevalence of bribe paying. We find that: (a) measures of political influence and corruption/bribes are uncorrelated at the firm level; (b) firms that...

How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This general question is the concern of officials in all branches and at all levels of the public sector: legislators, elected and appointed executives, and judges at federal,...

We analyze the problem of economic integration using a cooperative approach. By explicitly introducing time as an endogenous variable, we make sharp predictions about the timing of admission to coalitions, about the equilibrium coalition structure, about the equilibrium payoff distribution, as...

The elasticity of children’s economic status with respect to parents’ economic status is often taken as an indicator of the extent of equality of opportunity. While many studies have estimated the elasticity for the United States and other countries, only a few have tried to estimate the...

This paper examines the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next. We use intergenerational data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Child Supplement to estimate the effect of parental family SES (income and education) and other family background...

Taking a fresh look at the European Monetary System and its institutional successor, Europe's newly-inaugurated monetary union, this chapter asks whether power asymmetries and the "threat" of domestic political turnover might be influencing the types of international institutions and dispute...

Medical records are increasingly kept in electronic form. The existence of large medical data bases raises new questions about privacy and control over that information. When records exist in a form that they can easily be shared with others, there are legitimate fears about loss of privacy. The...

College-educated workers are twice as likely as high school graduates to make lasting long-distance moves, but little is known about the role of college itself in determining geographic mobility. Unobservable characteristics related to selection into college might also drive the relationship...