This paper addresses the following question: Does characterizing the state to be an agent of its citizens provide a useful "as if" framework for positive analysis of economic policy? Or, can we understand economic policy only by explicitly characterizing the state as proprietary, the instrument...

This paper formalizes the commonsensical hypothesis that resource scarcity causes people to allocate a large amount of time and effort to appropriative conflict. Our main innovation is to model explicitly the positive intertemporal effect of consumption on the probability of survival. The...

This paper argues that, given the legacy of Chinese communism and its political structure, corruption, together with the threat of punishment for corruption and the selective enforcement of this threat, serves as a method of compensation that both satisfies the political objectives of the...