I develop a model of strategic entry by candidates for office in runoff elections under aggregate uncertainty. I introduce aggregate uncertainty by making candidates unsure of the distribution of voter preferences in the electorate. The set of three candidate equilibria expands and equilibrium...

We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

Vote-buying is widely used by parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. We examine the impact of vote-buying on growth. We consider a model with a poverty trap where redistribution can promote growth. We show that vote-buying contributes to the persistence of poverty...

We study the effect of a huge sports sentiment shock, unrelated to economic conditions or government actions, on stock market outcomes. After Brazil's 7-1 humiliating defeat to Germany in the 2014 World Cup, which is likely to be one of the largest sports sentiment shocks ever, the stock market...

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for Indian federal and regional assemblies -- where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections -- we identify swing voters. We find that the representatives supported by swing voters outperform...

We document that postwar U.S. elections show a strong pattern of "incumbency disadvantage": If a party has held the presidency of the country or the governorship of a state for some time, that party tends to lose popularity in the subsequent election. We show that this fact can be explained by a...

We analyze the determinants of a firm's ownership structure when decisions over risk are taken by majority vote of risk-averse shareholders. We show that when a fraction of small, diversified shareholders abstains from voting, mid-sized blockholders may emerge to mitigate the conflict of...

We build a model of secession crises where voters may wish to accommodate the minority to prevent secession. We show the existence of a majority voting equilibrium with a government's type biased in favor of the minority. We propose a measure of secession risk and perform the comparative static...

We analyze a psychologically-based model of voter turnout in an election with common value and uncertainty. Our model yields distinctive comparative statics results. First, an increase in the proportion of informed citizens may cause the winning margin for the right candidate to either rise or...

In dieser Dissertation wird die Wechselwirkung zwischen der Wirtschaft und den Wahlen, Politikern und Politik untersucht. Um die Wähler über die Folgen ihrer Wahlentscheidung zu informieren, ist das Verständnis der Dreiecksbeziehung zwischen der Wirtschaft, den politischen Akteuren und den...