Rules excluding various kinds of evidence from criminal trials play a prominent role in criminal procedure and have generated considerable controversy. In this paper we address the general topic of excluding factually relevant evidence, that is, the kind of evidence that would rationally...

The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures in criminal investigations. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to require that police obtain a warrant prior to search and that illegally seized evidence be excluded from trial. A consensus has developed in the law and...

It is often claimed that the accumulation of "war chests" by incumbents deters entry by high-quality challengers in Congressional elections. This paper presents a game-theoretic analysis of the interaction between an incumbent, potential challengers, an interest group, and a representative...

The notion of 'incrementalism', formulated by Aaron Wildavsky in the 1960's, has been extremely influential in the public budgeting literature. In essence, it entails the claim that legislators engaged in budgetary policymaking accept past allocations, and decide only on the allocation of...

Budget rules enacted by Congress in the 1990's (and currently still in force) established pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules requiring that the revenue loss from any new or expanded tax expenditure provision be offset in the same fiscal year by legislation raising an equivalent amount of extra revenue....

This paper analyzes the factors influencing whether countries become tax havens. Roughly 15 percent of countries are tax havens; as has been widely observed, these countries tend to be small and affluent. This paper documents another robust empirical regularity: better-governed countries are...

This paper analyzes the influence of political and institutional factors on the enactment of sentencing guidelines and truth-in-sentencing legislation by US states. First, we develop a model of strategic interaction among the judiciary, parole boards and state legislators, to analyze the...

This paper compares the Congressional budget process (instituted in 1974) and the piecemeal appropriations process that preceded it. Previous theoretical analysis using spatial models of legislator preferences finds no systematic difference in relative spending levels under the two regimes. This...

This paper analyzes how speech may influence behavior by revealing social attitudes. As our main example, we focus on the possible effect of hate speech on hate crime. In our model, potential offenders care about esteem conferred by like-minded individuals whose numbers are uncertain but can be...

The standard economic model of bilateral precaution postulates that care taken by injurers and victims affects only expected accident loss. This paper considers situations in which each party's precaution also directly affects the other party's cost of taking precaution. When this additional...