It is generally assumed that autocrats set low environmental standards. The rationale for this is straightforward. High environmental standards raise the cost of production in society, lowering national income. Because the autocrat expropriates a large fraction of national income, he faces a...

All politicians, regardless of the nominal form of government within which they operate, face the trade-off between current period gains and tenure extension. That is, rulers can exploit their power for personal gain, but they risk being removed from their positions of power, either through a...

As club goods, religions face the problem of free riding. Smaller religious clubs, such as cults or sects, can often surmount this problem through communal pressures or by requiring their members to provide easily monitored signals. Generally, however, such tactics will be unavailable or too...

When the Fish and Wildlife Service designated land in four counties of Arizona as “critical habitat” necessary for the protection of the endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy‐owl, property values dropped considerably. When the owl was later delisted, property values jumped back up. We use...

This paper recasts current theories of regulatory or legislative competition. Building on the recent contribution of Buchanan and Yoon (2000), we consider alternative ways in which decision-making competence can be allocated among multiple legislative or administrative bodies. The general model...

Highly influential recent work by Benartzi et al. (2017) argues—based on comparisons of the respective effectiveness and costs of behavioral interventions (or nudges) versus traditional instruments—that nudges offer more cost-effective means than traditional interventions for changing...

A number of states have passed caps on non-economic and punitive damage awards in civil cases. The conventional wisdom is that the passage of these caps is driven by "out-of-control" jury awards that need to be reigned in. However, it could be the case that voters harboring anti-litigation,...