Our previous paper “The Parallel Universes of Institutional Investing and Institutional Voting” noted the current reality of an almost complete separation between the investment professionals at institutional investors who decide whether and when to buy or sell a company's stock, on the one...

We document a sharp reversal in electoral participation between the North and the South of Italy after the 1912 enfranchisement which extended voting rights from a limited lite to (almost) all adult males. When voting was restricted to the elite, electoral turnout was higher in the South but...

Standard political economy models of redistribution, notably that of Meltzer and Richard (1981), fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone...

Are elected presidents held accountable for economic declines in Latin America? The narrative of the impact of economic crises on the decision of voters tends to be focused in Western countries. This study examines recent trends in Latin American presidential countries and cast them in terms of...

We experimentally analyze the effect of endogenous group formation on the type of sanctioning institutions emerging in a society. We allocate subjects to one of two groups. Subjects play a repeated public goods game and vote on the sanctioning system (formal or informal) to be implemented in...

The military often intervenes in politics shortly after elections. This might be because election results reveal information about the ease with which a coup can succeed. Would-be coup perpetrators use this information to infer whether the incumbent can be removed from office without provoking...

We examine the relationship between voter preferences and political party platforms with respect to the regulation of externalities from private transactions. We begin with the argument that electoral rules, in particular those that determine whether voters focus on individual candidates or...