We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting, allowing a multidimensional policy space and multiple political parties. This model entails multiple equilibria. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy...

Abstract What accounts for the existence of positive energy taxes in the US, given that such taxes are regressive and that the income distribution is skewed to the right? The traditional majority-voting equilibrium approach suggests a subsidy; thus we also look at two alternatives. These are the...

Most public pension systems failed to build trust funds, even when it was clear that they were becoming unsustainable in the long run. It is argued in this paper that politicians ruling public pension programs have strong incentives to exhaust the trust funds, distributing benefits among voters...

In this paper I examine single member, simple plurality elections with n 2 probabilistic voters and show that the maximization of expected vote share and maximization of probability of victory are “generically different” in a specific sense. More specifically, I first describe finite...

This paper proposes a model of two-party representative democracy on a single-dimensional political space, in which voters choose their parties in order to influence the parties' choices of representative. After two candidates are selected as the median of each party's support group, Nature...

We consider an overlapping generations closed economy in which a government finances the cost of public good provision by labor income taxation and/or public debt issuance. The size of these public policies is determined in a repeated probabilistic voting game. We investigate the characteristics...

I illustrate by example a way in which equilibria under probabilistic voting are fragile with respect to assumptions about the non-policy components of voter preferences. I also offer intuition for the fragility using the social welfare functions which also describe the equilibria.

This discussion paper led to a publication in the 'European Journal of Political Economics', 2004, 20, 255-262.<P> In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure...</p>

This paper develops a two-period overlapping-generations model featuring en- dogenous growth and intergenerational conflict over fiscal policy. In particular, the paper characterizes a Markov-perfect political equilibrium of the voting game be- tween generations, and shows the following results....

This study extends the multi-country, politico-economic model of fiscal policy developed by Song, Storesletten, and Zilibotti (2012) to incorporate wage inequality within each country. In this extended framework, we present conflict within and across generations over fiscal policy and show that...