The military often intervenes in politics shortly after elections. This might be because election results reveal information about the ease with which a coup can succeed. Would-be coup perpetrators use this information to infer whether the incumbent can be removed from office without provoking...

In this paper we abstract from the usual gains and costs of decentralization (e.g. preference matching, spillovers and economies of scale). Instead we compare the political accountability of decentralized governments relative to centralized ones when there is a risk of bad governance. We study...

We examine the relationship between voter preferences and political party platforms with respect to the regulation of externalities from private transactions. We begin with the argument that electoral rules, in particular those that determine whether voters focus on individual candidates or...

During the 2008 primaries, Democratic voters split between two candidates, but support for Clinton and Obama was often a function of the type of primary institutions used by the state (i.e. primary or caucuse). These rule differences produced different electoral outcomes as Obama seemed to be...

Our previous paper “The Parallel Universes of Institutional Investing and Institutional Voting” noted the current reality of an almost complete separation between the investment professionals at institutional investors who decide whether and when to buy or sell a company's stock, on the one...