Public energy productivity investment influences the amount of future energy consumption. If a present government expects its successor to value the social costs of fuel usage differently, this adds a strategic component to its investment considerations. We analyze this governmental...

Public energy productivity investment influences the amount of future energy consumption. If a present government expects its successor to value the social costs of fuel usage dierently, this adds a trategic component to its investment considerations. We analyze this governmental...

Besley and Persson (2023) pioneer a political economy model of a green transition with changing preferences. Here we solve for the optimal policy intervention and find that the optimal tax on the polluting good starts high and is subsequently declining, to support the transition in preferences....

We model and test the representativeness of environmental policy-making, as implied by cost-benefit analysis (CBA) results, in governmental agencies assuming that individual civil servants maximize their personal utility. Education may also influence civil servants’ behavior. The biologists in...

Public energy productivity investment influences the amount of future energy consumption. If a present government expects its successor to value the social costs of fuel usage differently, this adds a strategic component to its investment considerations. We analyze this governmental...

This paper formulates a general theory of how political unrest influences public policy. Political unrest is motivated by emotions. Individuals engage in protests if they are aggrieved and feel that they have been treated unfairly. This reaction is predictable because individuals have a...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

We propose a positive formal framework for analyzing sovereign bail-outs in the context of the European Monetary Union (EMU) with a view to making policy recommendations regarding improvements to the EMU institutional architecture. We build our analysis on a political economic game-theoretic...