Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems ináuence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...

The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desidered over a series of binary decisions. By cumulating votes on issues that it deems most...

This paper analyzes the problem that an incumbent faces during the legislature when deciding how to react to popular initiatives or policy proposals coming from different sources. We argue that this potential source of electoral disadvantage that the incumbent obtains after being elected can...

Côte d'Ivoire is the world’s largest producer and exporter of cocoa beans, it accounts for 40% of the WAEMU's output, and 11% of its population are immigrant workers. Any political instability in the country will not only affect the domestic economy, but it will also affect the international...

We describe a model of fundraising in social groups, where private information about quality of provision is transmitted by social proximity. Individuals engage in voluntary provision of a pure collective good that is consumed by both neighbors and non-neighbors. We show that, unlike in the case...

This paper sheds light on the heavy financial burden on peasants in China's fiscal decentralization system. Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China's fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial...

The Homo economicus of traditional economics is far from being completely self-interested, rational, or as individualistic as he is purported to be; he will haggle to death over price but will not take what he wants by force. Implicitly, he is assumed to behave ruthlessly within a well-defined...

This paper analyzes the problem that an incumbent faces during the legislature when deciding how to react to popular initiatives or policy proposals coming from different sources. We argue that this potential source of electoral disadvantage that the incumbent obtains after being elected can...

This paper examines the endogenous choice between democracy and conflict in a scenario with different social classes in terms of income inequality and with parties representing each of the two social classes. We consider how the change in economic inequality between the poor and rich people...

Politicians can benefit by ensuring that public sector positions requiring political services are occupied by partisans. We study a model in which this political screening is achieved by varying the amount of required political services and associated compensation in otherwise similar positions....