I present a theory of political property rights that serves as a complement to familiar Tiebout mechanisms in explaining governance outcomes. I argue that when the structure of political property rights is such that the polity most closely resembles a business corporation, governance will be...

This paper formalizes the principle that persecution power of government may generate violent contests over it. We show that this principle yields a large set of theoretical insights on different separation-of-powers institutions that can help to preempt such contests under different...

We investigate a recent political theory of institutional change according to which institutions of economic freedom are more likely to be adopted at the extreme cases of strong and weak political competition than at cases in between. We find that such a U-shaped relationship is verified when...

We develop a model of legislative lobbying where policy proposals are endogenous. We show that a policy proposer with preferences tilted towards one lobby may be induced by an increase in that interest group's size to propose policies geared towards the opposing lobby. Hence, a larger lobby size...

This paper presents an empirical examination of economic and institutional development. Utilizing a novel data set on American Indian tribal nations, we investigate how constitutional design affects economic development, while holding the broader legal and political environment fixed....

In this paper the political economy of revolutions is revisited, as it has been developed and applied in a number of publications by Acemoglu and Robinson. We criticize the fact that these authors abstract from collective-action problems and focus on inequality of income or wealth instead. In...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

In this paper we offer an explanation why a poor majority does not necessarily expropriate a rich minority. We present a dynamic model in which individuals are willing to accept an unequal distribution of income in the current period if they are sufficiently optimistic about their future...

In this paper we examine the empirical relevance of three prominent endogenous protection models. Is protection for sale, or do altruistic policy makers worry about political support? We find strong evidence that protection is indeed for sale. The important new result is, however, that not only...