Against the backdrop of China’s increasingly influential role in the international financial architecture, this thesis seeks to characterize and evaluate China’s financial power potential. It does so by analyzing the relationship between domestic financial repression and international...

We examine the interaction between vote-share contracts and learning-by-doing. Candidates for a political office are allowed to offer vote-share thresholds. The elected politician has to achieve at least this threshold value in his reelection result to remain in office for a second term. We...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

Using data from an experiment by Forsythe, Myerson, Rietz, and Weber (1993), designed for a different purpose, we test the "standard theory" that players have preferences only over their own mentary payoffs and that play will be in (evolutionary stable) equilibrium. In the experiment each...

We develop a theoretical model regarding the migration of dual-earner couples and test it in the context of international migration. Our model predicts that the probability that a couple emigrates increases with the income of the primary earner, whereas the income of the secondary earner may...