This paper provides empirical evidence that campaign contributions arestrongly associated with market expectations of future firm-specific political favors,including preferential access to external financing. Using a novel dataset, we find thatfirms in Brazil providing contributions in the 1998...

Suppose that a group of agents having divergent expectations can share risks efficiently. We examine how this group should behave collectively to manage these risks. We show that the beliefs of the representative agent is in general a function of the group.s wealth level, or equivalently, that...

We examine the investment decision problem of a group whose members have heterogeneous time preferences. In particular, they have different discount factors for utility, possibly not exponential. We characterize the properties of efficient allocations of resources and of shadow prices that would...

The CNN exit polls after the 2004 election rated moral values the most important issue; next came jobs and the economy. Eighty percent of the voters who rated moral values the most important issue voted for Bush while eighty percent of the voters who rated jobs and the economy the most important...

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the...

Musgravian externalities, formulated and illustrated by Musgrave in a 1966 paper on social goods are seen in this paper as one form of the interactions that occur between the components of a federation. The original formal apparatus is first exposed briefly. In that context, it is then...

In this paper we argue that strong political economy forces explain the rush of the EU to expand eastwards. We use a model of vertical product differentiation in order to claim that technologically- advanced EU firms (residing in high-income member countries) prefer a mutual market-opening with...