In this paper we model the interaction between parties and candidates to highlight the mechanisms by which parties selecting candidates may discipline legislators. The selection of candidates happens by majority voting of party members. We assume a multidimentional policy space comprising an...

In this paper we show how the signalling effect of debt described by Ross (1977) does not work in an environment of hostile takeovers. This is because the effect of debt is to concentrate voting rights in the hands of the incumbent management, "jamming" the signal and preventing any...

Firms and environmental NGO's contest regulatory, legal and other Decisions in a variety of fora including law courts, administrative tribunals and the media. Environmental advocacy in the 1990's is big business, yet its organisation has been little studied. How can NGO's with differing...

The war in Iraq initiated in March 2003 triggered a wave of violence and turmoil in the country, exposing households to insecurity and to instability in daily life. The level of violence has varied across provinces, the south and centre areas being the most affected. Using the different...

I develop a model of rent seeking with informational foundations and an arbitrary number of rent seekers, and I compare the results with Tullock's (1980) classic model where the influence activities are "black-boxed." Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be...

This paper examines the role of the coalition formation process in a proportional system. It models its impact on the voters (who maximize their expected utilities) and the parties (who choose their platforms in a Nash game). In contrast with the intuitive idea that proportional systems...

By promoting some of the poor into the middle class and thereby co-opting them into the system, a self-interested elite reduces the threat of political instability and the risk of being overthrown. Co-optation is accomplished through the transfer of resources to some of the poor, enabling them...

Free riding in team production arises because individual effort is not perfectly observable. It seems natural to suppose that greater transparency would enhance incentives. Therefore, it is puzzling that team production often lacks transparency about individual contributions despite negligible...

Share price pressure can lead to managerial myopia as managers face incentives to make short-run decisions as modelled in Stein (1989). We show how long-run debt can negate myopic behaviour by serving as an incentive to have high future earnings in order to avoid the risk of costly bankruptcy....

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of...