The effectiveness of a central bank's monetary policy depends on the incentives of its head and board members to pursue an efficient policy in the citizens interest. Today, however, these incentives are weakened by three kinds of regulations. First, in almost all countries, only nationals may be...

What determines political candidates? election prospects? We match roll call votes of candidates for the majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with revealed preferences of their constituency. Thereby, we obtain a direct measure of past congruence....

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for the majority?s preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis by matching voting behavior on legislative proposals...

Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish in A-journals, the main role of which consists in certifying that a paper meets traditional academic standards. Consequences of this pressure are multiple authorship, slicing of ideas and incentives to deviate from the truth. The...

Rational voters' assessments of candidates and policy proposals are unbiased but affected by random errors. 'Clean' information decreases these errors, while 'dirty' information increases them. In politics, most voting procedures weigh random individual errors asymmetrically. Thus, such errors...