The ability of groups to implement efficiency-enhancing institutions is emerging as a central theme of research in economics. This paper explores voting on a scheme of intergroup competition which facilitates cooperation in a social dilemma situation. Experimental results show that the...

An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying businessmen-politicians through business proxies. When a politician controls a business, firms attempting to curry favors shift their spending towards the politician's business....

We study the mechanisms through which the adoption of the Euro delayed, rather than advanced, economic reforms in the Euro zone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional...

We introduce endogenous political parties into the Hotelling-Downs voting framework to model the selection of candidates. First, activists choose which party to join, if at all. Second, party members select a champion for the general election. Third, the electorate median voter determines the...

We present a tractable stochastic endogenous growth model that explains how social capital influences economic development. In our model, social capital increases citizens' awareness of government activity. Hence, it alleviates the electoral incentives to under-invest in education, whose returns...

We consider the impact of breaking news on market prices by looking at activity on the micro-blogging platform Twitter surrounding the #bigotgate scandal during the 2010 UK General Election, and subsequent movements of betting prices on a prominent betting exchange, Betfair. We find that the...

Why do Scandinavian countries perform better in terms of environmental protection than other European Union countries? In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that societies characterised by low income inequality (such as the nordic European countries) generate political-economic equilibria...

This paper studies the consequences of asymmetric litigation costs. Under three differ- ent protocols: static legal process, dynamic legal process with exogenous sequencing and dynamic legal process with endogenous sequencing, solutions are obtained for the litigation efforts and the expected...