Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

In legislation, to earmark means roughly to designate (through a statutory provision or an accompanying committee report) certain appropriated funds for narrow (nearly always geographically-delimited) purposes that appear to benefit particular interests. Policymakers, civil society...

This article develops a theory of standard-setting in which accounting standards emerge endogenously from an institutional bargaining process. It provides a unified framework with investment and voluntary disclosure to examine the links between regulatory institutions and accounting choice....

We assume that a voter’s judgment about a proposal depends on (i) the proposal’s probability of being right (or good or just) and (ii) the voter’s probability of making a correct judgment about its rightness (or wrongness). Initially, the state of a proposal (right or wrong), and the...

The present paper is part of unpublished book divided into three interrelated manuscripts that analyze the collapse of the Sudan. The theory introduced here is that the regime was built on kleptocratic framework. That enhanced a rapid transformation of the values' system of the country and...

During the life span of Spanish democracy, we have repeatedly observed many "puzzles" arising from the results of a general, state or municipal election, which, in turn, give way to governments based in partnerships of several political parties. In many democracies, it is a sine qua non...

This paper presents estimation of the Grossman-Helpman (1994) model for the EU. We try to address a number of pitfalls that surround the previous empirical literature. First, we suggest a new identification strategy that enables to single out politically organized sectors with specific regard to...

A disturbing phenomenon in voting, which causes most of the problems as well as the interest in the field, is that election outcomes (for fixed preferences) can change with the way the ballots are tallied. This causes difficulties because with each possible choice, some set of voters can be...

In this paper I study the strategic implications of coalition formation in an assembly. A coalition forms a voting bloc to coordinate the voting behavior of its members, acting as a single player and affecting the policy outcome. In a game of endogenous coalition formation, I show that voting...