The goal of this paper is to explore how the connection between political ideology and voters’ preferences is able to generate different equilibria in a yardstick competition game, where good incumbents are forced to create a bad reputation or, in other words, to mimic the bad incumbents’...

This paper investigates the presence of Granger-causality amongst market indices in six Asian stock markets: Malaysia, India, China, Pakistan, the Philippine and Japan, from April 7th 1992 to July 23rd 2008. Using daily market returns I performed a Granger-causality test, based on the Vector...

In this paper I analyse a probabilistic voting model where self-interested governments set their taxation policies in order to maximise the probabil- ity of winning elections. Society is divided into groups which have di¤erent preferences for the consumption of goods. Results show how...

This very brief paper aims to provide some little microeconomic hints in order to explain the early retirement of workers. In particular, the hipothesis of quasi-concavity of the utility function, differences in wage rates and in pension benefits are all factors which may contribute to force a...

This work intends to specify a formula for the optimal taxation in Probabilistic Voting Models with Single Mindedness Theory. The goal is to find an equivalent expression to the Ramsey’s rule for a political economy environment where Governments are assumed to be Leviathans rather than...

In this paper I analyse a labour market where the wage is endogenously determined according to an Efficient Bargaining process between a firm and a labour union whose members are partitioned into two social groups: the old and the young. Furthermore, I exploit the Single-Mindedness theory, which...

In this paper I analyse a labor market where the wage is endogenously determined according to a Right-to-Manage bargaining process between a firm and a labor union whose members are partitioned into two social groups: the old and the young. Furthermore, I exploit the Single Mindedness theory,...

In this paper I will introduce a new political economy model, where there exists a competition amongst two political candidates, which aim to set a policy which enables them to win elections, max- imising the probability of winning. I will show that, if taxes neces- sary to repay the debt are...

In this paper I test the normality of returns of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) from January 1st 1990 to December 5th 2008. Results obtained by Kolmogorov - Smirnov, Shapiro - Wilk and Skewness - Kurtosis tests are robust in demonstrating that the hypothesis of...

The central purpose of this paper is to introduce a new political economy approach which explains the characteristics of Social Security Systems. This approach is based on the Single-Mindedness Theory (SMT), which assumes that the more single-minded groups are able to exert a greater power of...