Mass media plays a crucial role in information distribution and thus in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by mass media reflects the media's incentives to provide news to different types of groups in society, and affects these groups'...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the political economy of the formation of international environmental agreements. The survey covers theoretical modelling approaches and empirical studies including experimental work. Central to our survey is the question how the political process...

This paper studies the interactions between electoral considerations and the imposition of price controls by opportunistic policymakers. The analysis shows that a policy cycle emerges in which price controls are imposed in periods leading to the election, and removed immediately afterwards. The...

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments,...

This paper considers terrorism as an extortion activity. It uses tools from the theory of extortion and from conflict theory to describe how terrorism works, why terrorism is a persistent phenomenon, why terrorism is a violent phenomenon, and how retaliation affects the outcome. The analysis...

This paper contributes to the debate on the efficacy of IMF's catalytic finance in preventing financial crises. Extending Morris and Shin (2006), we consider that the IMF's intervention policy usually exerts a signaling effect on private creditors and that several interventions in sequence may...

Official reports and case studies reveal that China experienced different means of communication with the world powers since it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. In the first five years, China had public communication with both the United States and the European Union under the...