We study elections in which two candidates poll voters about their preferred policies before taking policy positions. In the essentially unique equilibrium, candidates who receive moderate signals adopt more extreme platforms than their information suggests, but candidates with more extreme...

We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model in which voters have incomplete information. We first identify a novel "party competition effect" in a setting with two opposing parties. Compared with "at large" selection of candidates, party selection makes...

Agents expect to trade with each other infinitely often, but face a temporal absence of a coincidence of wants when they meet. Only loans and/or money can facilitate exchange. In small close-knit economies, enduring trade relationships are valued and loans are optimal. In larger economies,...

Typically, venture capital contracts feature stage financing where both parties commit to prohibiting {\em de novo} financing at each stage. The objective of this paper is to explain how these long--term contracts deal with entrepreneurial short--termism. We study an environment where...

This note explores endogenous rivalrous money supply by different generations of an overlapping generations economy. Money (gold) is intrinsically useless but is costly to create. The authors show how a government representing the young has an incentive to tax its constituency to mine gold to...

When parole boards learn whether inmates are rehabilitated by observing their behavior in prison, we show why they would release one inmate, while continuing to incarcerate another with a longer sentence, but who is otherwise observationally identical. This reflects that the longer a parole...