If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, the country leaders may fi…nd it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times. The conformity constraint -political leaders unwillingness or impossibility to depart from these norms -...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times. Political leaders' actions are bound by a "conformity constraint" that requires them...

World democracies widely differ in electoral rules, as well as in legislative, executive or legal institutions. Different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power. We explore how these mappings affect voters' participation to an...

If citizens of different countries belonging to an economic union adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on efficient policies, especially in hard times. Political leaders’ actions are bound to express...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on effcient policies especially in hard times. Political leaders’actions are bound by a “conformity constraint”that requires...

In an economy where agents are characterized by different productivities (vertical types) and different abilities to move (horizontal types), we compare a unified nonlinear optimal taxation schedule with the equilibrium taxation schedule that would be chosen by two competing tax authorities if...

We study direct democracy with population uncertainty. Voters' participation is often among the desiderata by the election designer. A participation quorum is a threshold on the fraction of participating voters below which the status quo is kept. We show that participation quorums produce...

Since World War II there have been about fifty episodes of large-scale mass killings of civilians and massive forced displacements. They were usually meticulously planned and independent of military goals. We provide a model where conflict onset, conflict intensity and the decision to commit...

We examine how natural resource location, rent sharing and fighting capacities of different groups matter for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential con.icts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts conflict to be more...