Why do bureaucratic principals appoint agents who hold different policy views from themselves? We posit an explanation based on the interplay between two types of agency costs: shirking on information production and policy bias. Principals employ biased agents because they shirk less. This...

This paper models how a nation's military manpower procurement system affects popular support for war and political choices regarding war. When citizens have idiosyncratic benefits from war and costs from serving, I characterize when a volunteer military maximizes support, and when a mixture of...

In the behavioral industrial organization literature, market forces may not eliminate inefficiencies associated with biased consumers. Regulations usually exist that could, but we show that self-governing citizen-consumers will not always enact these welfare-improving policies. In a market for...

In a system of divided power, public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive's key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who are observed playing two broad roles: allies, where they...

This note empirically analyzes how partisan control of a state's legislature alters the growth of the state's tax burden. Using two related empirical strategies, one based on instrumental variables using closely controlled legislatures and one based on regression discontinuity, I find large...