This article reviews the use of the concept of political instability in economic research, the importance of which has been growing in recent years due to its potentially profound economic consequences. The article explores this concept by working through the definitions, dimensions, and methods...

We study pollution cleanup in the Ganges in Varanasi, India. Voters elect politicians and elected politicians decide how much pollution to clean up. Between the two time periods, there is an election. Politicians are sincere or insincere. The marginal cost of public funds ζ measures how...

This paper introduces a voting model into a setting with negative borrowing externalities to study voter preferences for prudential regulation. Voters internalize the general equilibrium impact of prudential policy on future asset prices and therefore support a universal limit on current debt....

Efficiency requires legislative political institutions. There are many ways efficiency can be promoted, and so an ongoing legislative institution is necessary to resolve this choice in a politically sustainable and economically flexible way. This poses serious problems for classical liberal...

How should we aggregate the ex ante preferences of Bayesian agents with heterogeneous beliefs? Suppose the state of the world is described by a random process that unfolds over time. Different agents have different beliefs about the probabilistic laws governing this process. As new information...

Ronald Dworkin's equality of resources, and the closely related concept of envy-freeness, are two of the fundamental ideas behind fair allocation of private goods. The appropriate analog to these concepts in a public decision-making environment is unclear, since all agents consume the same...

Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

In this article, we empirically study the survival of the ruling party in parliamentary democracies using a hazard rate model. We define survival of a crisis as being successful in a critical vote in the parliament. We develop a general probabilistic model of political crises and test it...

We examine whether fiscal rules constrain incumbent governments to use fiscal policy for re-election purposes. Using data on fiscal rules provided by the IMF for a sample of 77 (advanced and developing) countries over the 1984-2015 period, we find that after the Global Financial Crisis political...