This paper examines the reasons why corruption and policy distortions tend to exhibit a high degree of persistence in certain regimes. We identify circumstances under which a firm seeks to evade regulations by (1) bribing of local inspectors, and (2) lobbying high-level government politicians to...

In the behavioral industrial organization literature, market forces may not eliminate inefficiencies associated with biased consumers. Regulations usually exist that could, but we show that self-governing citizen-consumers will not always enact these welfare-improving policies. In a market for...

Why do bureaucratic principals appoint agents who hold different policy views from themselves? We posit an explanation based on the interplay between two types of agency costs: shirking on information production and policy bias. Principals employ biased agents because they shirk less. This...

Regulation is very persistent, even when inefficient. We propose an explanation for regulatory persistence based on regulatory fog, the phenomenon by which regulation obscures information regarding the value of counterfactual policies. We construct a dynamic model of regulation in which the...

This survey encompasses multiple areas. The theoretical literature on environmental federalism continues to expand in areas such as capital competition and political economy. On the empirical side, emphasis is put on the existence of strategic interaction among states, the effects of President...

This paper examines the reasons why corruption and policy distortions tend to exhibit a high degree of persistence in certain regimes. We identify circumstances under which a firm seeks to evade regulations by (1) bribing of local inspectors and (2) lobbying high-level government politicians to...