This article considers how behavioral public choice theory can evolve and apply to U.S. national security, transnational security, and human rights fields. It draws upon the processes by which CIA, Defense Department, and other the Bush-Cheney administration officials implemented a new global...

We consider the optimal choice set of candidates standing for elected office. The decision dimensions are in the number of candidates standing for election, and the experiential base of the candidates standing for election as measured by the length of prior experience held by the candidates and...

Omission of collective choice prevents the analyst from understanding the central role of political equilibrium. To create a framework that places tax policies in a broader equilibrium context, we must model the underlying collective allocation mechanism and use it as a starting point, whether...

Omission of collective choice prevents the analyst from understanding the central role of political equilibrium. To create a framework that places tax policies in a broader equilibrium context, we must model the underlying collective allocation mechanism and use it as a starting point, whether...

Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in the first place depends on equilibrium tax policies. If a society believes that individual effort...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the...

Critical transitions for a country are historical periods when the powerful organizations in a country shift from one set of beliefs about how institutions (the formal and informal rules of the game) will affect outcomes to a new set of beliefs. Critical transitions can lead a country toward...

In a society composed of a ruler and its citizens: what are the determinants of the political equilibrium between these two? This paper approaches this problem as a game played between a ruler who has to decide the distribution of the aggregate income and a group of agents/citizens who have the...

Political connections between firms and autocratic regimes are not secret and often even publicly displayed in many developing economies. We argue that tying a firm's available rent to a regime’s survival acts as a credible commitment forcing entrepreneurs to support the government and to...