The literature on staggered privatization sales suggests that governments can effectively signal commitment to not expropriate the future rents of privatized firms. The privatization of telephone firms around the world provides an excellent opportunity to test this theory. Using a sample of...

We study alternative institutional arrangements for the determination of monetary policy in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, where monetary policy has redistributive effects. Inflation is determined by a policy board using either simple-majority voting, supermajority...

It is well established that the provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if the good is normal. What I show is that if the good exhibits even a small degree of rivalry, then the individual level of consumption of the public good falls to 0 in a large group. Thus, a strong...

We extend the setup of Arrow's General Possibility Theorem by introducing as additional policy alternatives the possibility to delegate certain decisions to an external institution or random device. We show that in this extended setting there exists a Social Welfare Functional with universal...

This paper evaluates the role of centralized punishment in boosting contribution to the provision of public goods. To avoid the race to the bottom in the provision of public goods, this centralized punishment mechanism relies on the use of the unilateral and tie punishment imposed on the lowest...

This paper analyses the decision-making processes of heterogeneous agents, when both individual preferences and group actions are taken into account. Under the assumptions of certain topologies of interactions and assuming cognitive and informational restrictions, an agent-based model is...

Share equilibrium was introduced in van den Nouweland and Wooders (2011) as an extension of Lindahl's original equilibrium concept (Lindahl, 1919) to local public good economies. The current paper contains a comprehensive study of the possible share equilibrium outcomes of symmetric individuals,...

Many public goods can be provided at different spatial levels. Evidence from social identity theory and in-group favoritism raises the possibility that where higher-level provision is more efficient, subjects' narrow concern for local outcomes (parochialism) could harm efficiency. Building on...

Recent historical works, most notably 2017's Democracy in Chains, claim that 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's formative contributions to political economy were inspired in significant part by hostility to Brown v. Board of Education. This argument suggests that the research agenda of...