Globalization, governance and economic performance affect each other in very complex mutual relationships. In this Paper, we establish a clear and well-circumscribed hypothesis: ‘Is there an effect of globalization on governance?’ To test this hypothesis or, even more specifically, to test...

We formalize a notion of conditionally decisive powers of which the exercise depends on social consent. Decisive powers, or the so-called libertarian rights, are examples and much weaker forms of powers are covered by our notion. Main results provide an axiomatic characterization for existence...

We analyze the role of privatization in creating a constituency for economic reform, markets, and democratic institutions, focusing on the Czech Republic. Drawing on a 1996 survey, we examine the 1459 respondents' opinions on reforms, economic policies and systems, the legitimacy of transition,...

Which issues are discussed by candidates in an election campaign? Why are some issues never discussed? Model tractability is lost quickly when dealing with these questions, partly because of the multidimensional voting inherent in models of multiple issues. Our model features two candidates for...

This paper generalizes previous existence results on unidimensional electoral competition, by extending the traditional two-party electoral game to the case where parties have mixed motivations, in the sense that they are interested in winning the election, but also in the policy implemented...

A decision maker is contemplating an action whose outcome is state dependent. She has a ‘prior’ over the states of the world and before choosing an action, she can consult an ‘expert’. We model the communication game between the decision maker and the expert as a ‘cheap-talk’ game....

We study option management by committee. Analysis is illustrated by tenure decisions. Our innovations are two-fold: we treat the committee's problem as one of social choice, not of information aggregation; and we endogenise the outside option: rejecting a candidate at either the probationary or...

An unstable macroeconomic environment is often regarded as detrimental to economic growth. Among the sources contributing to such instability, much of the blame has been assigned to political issues. This paper empirically tests for a causal and negative long-run relationship between political...

'Gainful trade: a new economics' explains why and how economics may be rebuilt from scratch to allow the occurence of gainful trade. It uses a new concept of consistency of social choice and a new analytical tool called consistency analysis to build a unified model of economics. It answers all...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants allocated to co-partisans buy more political support than grants allocated to local governments controlled by opposition parties. We use a rich Spanish database containing information about the grants received by 617...