Success and failure of democracy are interpreted as different equilibria of a dynamic political game with cost of changing leadership and incomplete information about politicians' virtue. Unitary democracy can be frustrated when voters do not replace corrupt leaders, because any new leader would...

This paper offers a short introduction to some of the fundamental results of social choice theory. Topics include Nash implementability, monotonic social choice correspondences, the Muller-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem, anonymous and neutral social choice correspondences, sophisticated...

This paper considers a simple model of credit cycles driven by moral hazard in financial intermediation. Financial agents or bankers must earn moral-hazard rents, but the cost of these rents can be efficiently spread over an agent's entire career by promising large late-career rewards if the...

We consider a simple overlapping-generations model with risk-averse financial agents subject to moral hazard. Efficient contracts for such financial intermediaries involve back-loaded late-career rewards. Compared to the analogous model with risk-neutral agents, risk aversion tends to reduce the...

This paper develops an economic perspective on political theory, as a guide to some problems and directions of current research. The electoral system and the allocation of powers to elected offices together define the game that politicians play. So democratic structures should be compared and...

The Poisson model of games with population uncertainty is extended, by allowing that expected population sizes and players' utility functions may depend on an unknown state of the world. Such extended Poisson games are applied to prove a generalization of the Condorcet jury theorem.

It is commonly argues that reducing the number of hours worked by the employed would lead to lower unemployment, since firms will respond by hiring more workers. This paper examines the relationship between hours worked and unemployment, in the context of an efficiency wage model where...

This paper considers basic constitutional questions about how to elect a legislature. Electoral systems that require blocks of voters to coordinate their votes create a need for pre-election leadership and raise barriers to entry against new parties. Such barriers to entry can rigidity the...