Hindsight bias is a cognitive deficiency that leads people to overestimate ex post how predictable an event was. In this paper we develop a political-agency model in which voters are hindsight-biased and politicians differ in ability, defined as information concerning the optimal policy. When...

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 argues that uncertain or random voter turnout plays a key role in mediating conflicts of interest between voters and politicians on the one hand and heterogenous groups of voters on the other. Random voter turnout creates an incentive for politicians to seek con- sensus because it is...

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently economic performance. But if the quality of leadership matters, then understanding what motivates individuals to become politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central...

Using a theoretical model of repeated political competition among two career politicians, I study the incentives of both the corrupt and clean politicians not to adopt a fully effective reform targeting political corruption. In the setup I study, each politician can credibly adopt the reform as...

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 examines whether access to information enhances political accountability. Based upon the results of Brazil’s recent anti-corruption program that randomly audits municipal expenditures of federally-transferred funds, it estimates the effects of the disclosure of local government...

This study reports theory-testing laboratory experiments on the effect of yardstick competition on corruption. On the incumbent side, yardstick competition acts as a corruption-taming mechanism if the incumbent politician is female. On the voter side, voters focus on the difference between the...

Voters often split tickets, voting for candidates from different parties in simultaneous elections. In this paper, I apply a political agency framework with implicit incentives to study ticket splitting in simultaneous municipal and regional elections. I show that ticket splitting is a natural...