“We are all socialists now,” Newsweek magazine declared some months ago. And with Republican stalwarts George Bush, Chris Cox, and Alan Greenspan respectively presiding over two of the largest expansions in federal programs since the New Deal, confessing to the failures of self-regulation,...

Can an autocrat gain control over her agents, reducing embezzlement in the short run, with mass anti-corruption campaigns? Can an autocrat obtain some selection, improving the honesty of agents within the regime? We use of formal model of top-down accountability to answer these questions. We...

An economic elite wants to buy a public asset as cheaply as possible, whose ownership is decided by an incumbent politician who can be of high or low competence. The elite can exert influence through two channels: they can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer for the asset, and they can manipulate...

This paper shows how provision of public goods differ in the context of centralisation and decentralisation when the incumbent politician confers the responsibility of the actual provision to a bureaucrat who extracts bribe from the public and provides a predetermined portion of it to the...

This paper introduces incomplete information in the standard model of cultural transmission (Bisin and Verdier, 2001). We allow parents to ignore own group size and the efficiency of their cultural transmission technology, while receiving a feedback from their children. Using the selfconfirming...

We study identification of preferences in static single-agent discrete choice models where decision makers may be imperfectly informed about the state of the world. We leverage the notion of one-player Bayes Correlated Equilibrium by Bergemann and Morris (2016) to provide a tractable...