This paper argues that, in the middle ages, voting institutions emerged as mechanisms that allowed rulers to cooperate with subjects on mutually profitable projects. In spite of their utility, many of these voting institutions eventually declined. The authors test the model on the English...

Thirty years ago, "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960) was published. It transformed the field of industrial organization and greatly expanded its scope. The authors briefly survey the state of the field before 1960 and then show some of the ways by which Ronald Coase's paper changed economic...

Consumers' optimal consumption strategy in anticipation of price variations is to equalize the marginal utility of income across different price regimes. Since the marginal utility of income is positively related to the price of a Giffen good, consumers will adopt a consumption plan (through...