Studies on EU enlargement mostly focus on its welfare-economic and much less so on its public-choice dimension. Yet, the latter may be as important as the former when it comes to sustain integration. This paper aims at filling the gap by exploring theoretically and empirically how enlargement of...

The theory of economic voting has extensively explored the influence of national economic conditions on votes for the incumbent party during elections. Such literature has never, however, explored the potential effects of economy on other types of voting swings in the sense of change in votes...

This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics ('brand equity'), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms - either a wholesaling...

We analyze Nash equilibria of share and probabilistic contests when players have distributional preferences. If players are sufficiently similar, distributional preferences create multiple equilibria. For the case of only mildly heterogeneous players, equilibrium effort can be lower as well as...

With politician preferences over policy outcomes, the effect of a contribution cap with monetary penalties for exceeding the cap is starkly different from the case with an indifferent politician. In contrast to Kaplan and Wettstein (AER, 2006) and Gale and Che (AER, 2006), a cap is never neutral...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

This paper studies empirically the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of autocratic leaders. A simple theoretical setting shows how the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of the dictatorial regime is mediated by the price of oil. Using a dataset on 106...

In innovation contests, the progress of the competing firms in the innovation process is usually their private information. We analyze an innovation contest in which research firms have a stochastic technology to develop innovations at a fixed cost, but their progress is publicly announced. We...

This paper develops a simple model that analyses the relationship between a country's oil endowment and the duration of its autocratic leader. The dictator uses the rents from oil extraction for both personal gain and to pay-off potential opposition and chooses an optimal level of oil...

This paper studies how heterogeneity in income dynamics affects the POUM hypothesis (the idea that poor people do not support high level of redistribution because they hope to be rich in the future). We consider a setting where individuals evaluate their expected future income using both their...