National Research Assessments represent the principal policy used by countries with public university systems to improve the quality of their universities׳ research. They typically employ expert panels of local academics to assess journal quality, and use such assessments to reward...

A lack of sufficient diversification in research strategies has been identified as an important problem for delegated research. We show that this problem can be solved by local competition (such as bribery, lobbying, rent seeking, competition at the patent office) among players who apply the...

We consider a political agency model where voters learn information about some policy-relevant variable, which they can ignore when it impedes their desire to hold optimistic beliefs. Voters' excessive tendency to sustain optimism may result in inefficient political decision-making because...

The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public...

We analyze how anticipated changes in the electoral vulnerability of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The electoral vulnerability changes due to a merger because it changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in the...

Random mechanisms have been used in real-life situations for reasons such as fairness. Voting and matching are two examples of such situations. We investigate whether desirable properties of a random mechanism survive decomposition of the mechanism as a lottery over deterministic mechanisms that...

Negative correlations between inflation and demographic aging were observed across developed nations recently. To understand the phenomenon from a politico-economic perspective, we embed the fiscal theory of the price level into an overlapping-generations model. In the model, successive...