Does redistribution in democracies cater to the will of the majority? We propose a direct empirical strategy based on survey data that needs not assume that voters are guided by pecuniary motives alone. We find that most democracies implement the median voter's preferred amount of redistribution...

The domestic politics of globalization are essentially as old as globalization itself. Trade and other international transactions affect a broad spectrum of individual economic interests. For example, relatively less-efficient domestic firms lose, and importers and consumers desiring goods...

Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much discussion in the context of modeling and identification of...

The main question guiding this study is whether international labor standards will benefit the poor, in particular, developing countries and the poor in those countries. We survey the theoretical literature on international labor standards, and give an overview of the analytical framework and...

Corruption is usually viewed as an impediment to investment and growth. However, China's experience suggests that the issue is probably more complex: In the past government officials would go out of their way to promote investment and development. But since the start of a far-reaching...

John Maynard Keynes became world famous with the publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, a harsh critique of the Versailles peace treaty. As a consequence, Keynes was nominated by German professors in economics for the Nobel Peace Prize three years in a row, 1922, 1923 and...

The financial side of terrorism has not been given due importance in the literature. This paper analyses the implications of the financial side of terrorism for the relationship between the incidence of terrorism and affluence. It is assumed that the number of recruits who volunteer to join a...

We study information design in a regime change context. A continuum of agents choose independently whether to attack the current regime and will succeed if and only if the mass of attackers outweighs the regime's strength. The strength is uncertain, and the information designer chooses a...