A common assumption in political economy is that there exists a consistent and well defined policy space. Often, this space is assumed to be adequately represented by a single `left' - `right' dimension. This paper makes the case that it is not only convenient but also meaningful to talk of the...

The method of instrumental variables (IV) and the generalized method of moments (GMM) and their applications to the estimation of errors-in-variables and simultaneous equations models in econometrics require data on a sufficient number of instrumental variables which are (insert space)both...

We focus on four stylized facts of behavior under risk. Decision makers: (1) Overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities. (2) Ignore events of extremely low probability and treat extremely high probability events as certain. (3) Buy inadequate insurance for very low...

An output gap measure is suggested based on the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition of output using a vector-autoregressive model that includes data on actual output and on expected output obtained from surveys. The paper explains the advantages of using survey data in business cycle analysis and the...

We show that previous results suggesting that government ownership of banks is associated with lower long run growth rates are not robust to adding more “fundamental” determinants of economic growth. We also present new cross-country evidence for 1995- 2007 which suggests that, if anything,...

We study a setting where imitative players are matched into pairs to play a Prisoners' Dilemma game. A well know result in such setting is that under random matching cooperation vanishes for any interior initial condition. The novelty of this paper is that we add a certain correlation to the...

This paper reconsiders Persson and Tabellini’s (2003,2004) analysis of the causal effect of constitution type on government size, it addresses the concerns of Acemoglu ( 2005) and makes some further refinements to argue that there is a qualitatively large, and statistically significant...

In this paper we study learning procedures when counterfactuals (payo s of not-chosen actions) are not observed. The decision maker reasons in two steps: First, she updates her propensities for each action after every payo experience, where propensity is de ned as how much she prefers each...

We put forward a modern version of the ‘developmental’ view of government-owned banks which shows that the combination of information asymmetries and weak institutions creates scope for such banks to play a growth-promoting role. We present new cross-country evidence consistent with our...