At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

This paper formulates a simple mathematical framework for the selection of an optimum "relative unanimity” collective decision rule. The approach is first to identify the benefits of moving from a rule of simple majority towards a rule of full unanimity. Then, the costs of moving from simple...

This paper investigates whether political competition plays an important role in determining the level of agricultural protection. In order to do so, we exploit variation in political and economic data from 74 developing and developed countries for the post-war period. Our results robustly show...

This paper contributes to literature on the process of reform in Latin America. We study political economy aspects and the policy making process of reforms in what we identify as the five critical steps through the "life cycle" of a policy reform: the Planning, Dialogue, Adoption,...

An adversarial game is used to model a firm's intrinsic and exerted influence over a regulator. Data from the World Business Environment Survey provide strong evidence in support of model hypotheses across a wide range of government agents, countries, and regulatory areas. Of particular...

This research is devoted to political and economic aspects of closed democracy institutions afoot. The book describes basic approaches to contrastive analysis in this field, typical problems that cause deviations in democratic institutional system’s development and major conditions and ways to...

The main question addressed in the model regards which type of incentives an elected politician has to choose good or bad policies. In order to answer it, we focus on two inefficiencies, recently considered in the literature: the down-up problem and voters having bias beliefs and voting...

Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians’ incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians’ mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

This paper studies the interaction between different actors in the policy-making process of fiscal transfer reform in Colombia. To analyse this reform, we use the “life cycle of reform” framework. In that context, we follow critical phases in the reform process: planning, dialogue and...

Using a model of repeated agency, we explain previously unexplained features of the real-world lobbying industry. Lobbying is divided between direct representation by special interests to policymakers, and indirect representation where special interests employ professional intermediaries called...