We investigate the role of political favouritism in the private education market. Using constituency-level panel data and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we estimate the causal effect of having a politician aligned with the state ruling party on the growth of private...

We study the rent-seeking behaviour of political parties in a proportional representation system, where the final policy choice of the parliament is a weighted average of parties' policy positions, weights being their vote shares. We nd that parties' policy preferences and their rent levels are...

Broad consensus exists that the ability of political actors to make credible commitments is key to development. An important and little-explored determinant of the credibility of political commitments is the existence of organizations that facilitate citizen collective action to sanction...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of debt, government finance and expenditure. Agents have preferences over a private and a government-provided public good, financed through labor taxation. Subsequent generations of voters choose taxation, government expenditure and debt...

In this paper I study the strategic implications of coalition formation in an assembly. A coalition forms a voting bloc to coordinate the voting behavior of its members, acting as a single player and affecting the policy outcome. In a game of endogenous coalition formation, I show that voting...

A central challenge in political economy is to identify the conditions under which legislators seek to bring home the pork to constituents. We conduct the first systematic analysis of one determinant of constituency service, voter attachment to political parties, holding constant electoral and...

This Article examines the merits of vote buying at a more detailed level than has been done previously. Various scenarios are played-out of how an actual election would function if vote buying were permitted. The Article concludes, in line with past scholarship, but for different reasons, that...

We use the citizen-candidate model to study the differential incentives that alternative voting rules provide for candidate entry, and their effect on policy polarization. In particular, we show that allowing voters to cast multiple votes leads to equilibria which support multiple candidate...

We analyze a simple stochastic environment where policymakers can be threatened by "nasty" interest groups. In the absence of these groups, the policymaker's desire for reelection guarantees that good policies are implemented for every realization of the shock. When pressure groups can harass...