We consider a situation where society decides, through majority voting in a secret ballot, between the alternatives of ‘reform’ and ‘status quo’. Reform is assumed to create a minority of winners, while being efficient in the Kaldor-Hicks sense. We explore the consequences of allowing...

Why do governments redistribute through indirect and inefficient means? An intuitive hypothesis is that it masks the real aim and cost of policy. In this paper we construct a dynamic model with an infinite horizon, political competition, rational individuals and asymmetric information regarding...

We consider a situation where society decides, through majority voting in a secret ballot, between the alternatives of ‘reform’ and ‘status quo’. Reform is assumed to create a minority of winners, while being efficient in the Kaldor-Hicks sense. We explore the consequences of allowing...