Theories of political accountability often consider voter-politician interactions in isolation from politician-bureaucrat interactions. We study a model of electoral accountability with a governing hierarchy: voter-politician-bureaucrat. The politician and bureaucrat both produce government...

We characterize the extreme points of first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD) intervals and show how these intervals are at the heart of many topics in economics. Using knowledge of these extreme points, we characterize the distributions of posterior quantiles under a given prior, leading to an...

his paper examines how violence in the Second Intifada influences Palestinian public opinion. Using micro data from a series of opinion polls linked to data on fatalities, we find that Israeli violence against Palestinians leads them to support more radical factions and more radical attitudes...

We consider the exercise of power in competitive markets for goods, labour and credit. We offer a definition of power and show that if contracts are incomplete it may be exercised either in Pareto-improving ways or to the disadvantage of those without power. Contrasting conceptions of power...

This article analyzes a much debated clause in the 1996 coalition contract between SPD and F.D.P. in Rheinland-Pfalz. Two parties write a contract, based on which decisions under incomplete information have to be made at a later point in time. It is shown that a complex complete contract can...

In this paper we analyze the problem of whether and/or when to replace a leader (agent) when no monetary rewards are available, and it is the leader's competence rather than effort that is being evaluated. The only decisions that the leader takes over time are whether to undertake risky but...

This paper examines the problem of renegotiation of infrastructure concessions in Latin America using a model of litigation with an application to incentive contracts. Opportunistic renegotiation is here defined as a rent seeking game, to show the effect of the legal system characteristics in...

This paper introduces an informal model of behavior of Politicians and Social Leaders in their mutual relations in the context of influencing the beliefs of voters. Facing uncertainty about Politicians voters turn to Social Leaders as information short-cuts. Leaders include NGOs, the media and...

This paper considers a political accountability framework in which the politician exerts unobserved e¤ort in two independent dimensions. Since the worst payo¤ to the politician is removal from o¢ ce, this contracting environment exhibits limited liability. We show that limited liability...