We consider two types of consumers, educated and uneducated, with each preferring a different variety of goods. A decisive set of persons can impose compulsory education on all. We find conditions under which educated persons will want to impose compulsory education, and conditions under which...

We consider a model with two types of consumers, with each preferring a different variety of goods, and with each better at producing the type of good it prefers to consume. We find that under plausible conditions members of the majority group earn a higher wage and enjoy higher utility than...

We consider taxes on firms which engage in rent-seeking contests. The taxes can be on realized profits or on rent-seeking expenditures, and the firms can engage in a context where either the hoghest bidder wins the prize, or else a firm's probability of winning equals the ratio of its...

We explain the plypaper effect (the tendency of a government's expenditures to increase by the amount of a grant it receives) as the result of rational calculations by voters who believe that a jurisdiction which won a grant is espatially competent. Similarly, a voter who sees that a neighboring...

People who suffer disutility from making mistakes may prefer to face consumption choices which reduce their chances of making mistakes. One consequence is that a firm may attract greater demand by charging a single price for different goods than by charging different prices for different goods.

Data from US presidential elections show that most third parties take extreme positions rather than positions between those of the major partie. This and other phenomena are explained with an extension of the Downsian model of voting. When parties choose not only positions, but also choose among...

Does the new information revealed by election outcomes help to explain unexpected fluctuations in foreign exchange rates? To answer this question, we examine the behavior of errors from forecasting future exchange rate surrounding elections.