The thesis studies the potential of incentive contracts for politicians using game-theoretic methods. Supplementing the … election mechanism with these contracts is a new idea to make politicians more accountable. Two types of incentive contracts … enhance the accountability of politicians and to increase social welfare. …

, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings …This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework … that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings. -- Political competition ; outside …