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...

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...

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...

Firstly, two seemingly unrelated topics of Russian politics are investigated. It is shown that under expected utility maximization the assumptions of an unbiased oil forward market and a risk-acceptant attitude (strictly convex utility function) of president Putin are sufficient to explain...

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...

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...

In this paper, foreign aid transfers can distort individual incentives, and hence hurt growth, by encouraging rent-seeking as opposed to productive activities. We construct a model of a small growing open economy that distinguishes two effects from foreign transfers: (i) a direct positive...

Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, we analyze trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connection; differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trustworthiness. Certain individuals appear to be persistently more...

This paper explores the relationship between public sector efficiency (PSE) and the level of democracy, both theoretically and empirically. At the theoretical level a simple model of elections with two time periods is presented, which takes into account whether the political regime is democratic...