We show that informative political campaigns can increase political extremism and decrease voter welfare. We present a model of elections in which candidate ideology is strategically selected prior to a campaign which reveals information about candidate quality. Documented means by which...

Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model in which ideological parties select candidates between party loyalists and experts, and allocate them into the electoral districts. Non-ideological voters, who care about national and...

This paper presents a political economy model of inflation as a result of social conflict. Agents are heterogeneous in terms of income. Agents' income levels determine their ability to hedge against the effects of inflation. The interaction of heterogeneous cash holdings and preferences over...

The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to their citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study, we ask why different...

Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model in which ideological parties select candidates between party loyalists and experts, and allocate them into the electoral districts. Non-ideological voters, who care about national and...

This paper presents a political economy model of inflation as a result of social conflict. Agents are heterogeneous in terms of income. Agents’ income levels determine their ability to hedge against the effects of inflation. The interaction of heterogeneous cash holdings and preferences over...

This paper introduces a democratic voting process into an OLG economy in order to analyze the e ffects of a rising old-age dependency ratio on the composition of government spending and endogenous economic growth. Forward-looking agents vote each period on the public policy mix between...

This paper develops a two-period overlapping-generations model featuring en- dogenous growth and intergenerational conflict over fiscal policy. In particular, the paper characterizes a Markov-perfect political equilibrium of the voting game be- tween generations, and shows the following results....

This study extends the multi-country, politico-economic model of fiscal policy developed by Song, Storesletten, and Zilibotti (2012) to incorporate wage inequality within each country. In this extended framework, we present conflict within and across generations over fiscal policy and show that...

This paper proposes a model of two-party representative democracy on a single-dimensional political space, in which voters choose their parties in order to influence the parties' choices of representative. After two candidates are selected as the median of each party's support group, Nature...