This paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter’s curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on 'pivotal voter' models. Our experiment controls for different information levels of voters, as well as the size of the electorate, the...

This paper presents a political economy theory of fiscal policy. Policy choices are made by a legislature that can raise revenues via an income tax and by borrowing. Revenues can be used to finance a public good, whose value is stochastic, and pork-barrel spending. Policymaking cycles between a...

We study the Markov equilibria of a model of free riding in which n infinitely lived agents choose between private consumption and irreversible contributions to a durable public good. We show that the set of equilibrium steady states converges to a unique point as depreciation converges to zero....