Due to moral hazard problems, municipal mergers in Japan did not result in as many amalgamations as a central planner would have chosen. The inefficiency of the decentralized mergers is calculated using structural parameter estimates based on observed mergers and actual national government...

Due to moral hazard problems, municipal mergers in Japan did not result in as many amalgamations as a central planner would have chosen. The inefficiency of the decentralized mergers is calculated using structural parameter estimates based on observed mergers and actual national government...

Political coalition formation games can describe the formation and dissolution of nations, as well as the creation of coalition governments, the establishment of political parties, and other similar phenomena. These games have been studied from a theoretical perspective, but the models have not...

Political coalition formation games can describe the formation and dissolution of nations, as well as the creation of coalition governments, the establishment of political parties, and other similar phenomena. These games have been studied from a theoretical perspective, but the models have not...

Political coalition formation games can describe the formation and dissolution of nations, as well as the creation of coalition governments, the establishment of political parties, and other similar phenomena. These games have been studied from a theoretical perspective, but the resulting models...

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

In a large-scale controlled trial in collaboration with the reelection campaign of an Italian incumbent mayor, we administered (randomized) messages about the candidate's valence or ideology. Informational treatments affected both actual votes in the precincts and individual vote declarations....

We present a new automated, objective and intuitive scoring method to measure the content of central bank communication about future policy rate moves. We apply the methodology to statements released by the Federal Open Market Commitee (FOMC) after monetary policy meetings. Using high-frequency...