The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions. By accumulating votes on issues that it deems most...

A state which does not desire an arms race may nevertheless acquire new weapons if it believes another state will acquire them. If each state assigns some arbitrarily small probability to the event that the other state has a dominant strategy to acquire more weapons, then a multiplier effect...

The notion of optimality is often invoked informally in the literature on metacognitive control. We provide a precise formulation of the optimization problem and show that optimal time allocation strategies depend critically on certain characteristics of the learning environment, such as the...

This paper proposes a continuous-time model framework of bargaining, which is analytically tractable even in complex situations like coalitional bargaining. The main ingredients of the model are: (i) players get to make offers according to a random arrival process; (ii) there is a deadline that...

This Article advocates that financial regulators analyze, measure, and take into account the emotional impacts of their policies and procedures. Examples of emotional impacts are investor confidence, process concerns, and overall market or social mood. Investor confidence or trust in securities...

We argue that when discoveries are "sequential" (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such...

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization...

This research suggests that the evolution of entrepreneurial spirit played a significant role in the process of economic development and the dynamics of inequality within and across societies. The study argues that entrepreneurial spirit evolved non-monotonically in the course of human history....

This study explores the determinants of ethnolinguistic diversity within as well as across countries shedding light on its geographic origins. The empirical analysis conducted across countries, virtual countries and pairs of contiguous regions establishes that geographic variability, captured by...