This article examines play calling in the National Football League (NFL). It finds that a mixed strategy equilibrium game explains NFL play calling better than standard optimization techniques. When a quarterback is injured and replaced with a less capable backup, standard optimization theory...

There is little professional consensus regarding the effect of economic conditions on House Elections. We argue that recent work still uses the paradigm of Party to organize their data and tests. Given that recent developments in the theory of congress emphasize the paradigm of Incumbency, we...

The two dominant labor market turnover hypotheses, the firm-specific human capital model (FSHCM) and the job-matching model, suggest different patterns of player mobility in major league baseball. The matching hypothesis predicts greater mobility of players in positions that require substantial...

The Leviathan theory of government was seemingly contradicted when the U.S. Congress passed the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law. This study analyzes the Senate vote on Gramm-Rudman to try to determine whether legislators acted in their own self-interest. A prisoner's dilemma argument explains...

The effect of macroeconomic fluctuations on House elections is a long debated, but still unresolved, issue. We argue that return rates are theoretically superior to vote shares as measures of electoral accountability and that incumbents, not candidates of the president's party, are the...