Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We...

The neoclassical market economy fails to achieve full employment. Therefore, the job guarantee schemes have become the inevitable tools to achieve full employment. The success of a scheme needs an analytical framework to run. The paper explains and gives the analytical framework to it. A few...

This paper studies electoral competition over redistributive taxes between a safe incumbent and a risky opponent. As in prospect theory, economically disappointed voters become risk lovers, and hence are intrinsically attracted by the more risky candidate. We show that, after a large adverse...

Theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties' seat shares determine their bargaining power. We present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction. We use data from 2,898 municipal Spanish elections in which two...

In multi-round elimination tournaments, players experience "psychological momentum". We re-consider the design of elimination tournament plan, by taking into account of various types of psychological momentum. The results show that if there is negative psychological momentum, either persistent...

We consider the optimal choice set of candidates standing for elected office. The decision dimensions are in the number of candidates standing for election, and the experiential base of the candidates standing for election as measured by the length of prior experience held by the candidates and...

The permanent income hypothesis states that agents perfectly smooth consumption given a large, anticipated shock to income. Testing these implications is difficult given the endogenous nature of income and payment timing. We leverage exogenous variation in military bonus size and timing matched...