La composition du parlement libanais est basée sur un compromis entre les différentes confessions religieuses de ce pays, souvent considéré comme seule démocratie parlementaire de l’Orient arabe. A partir des outils de la théorie des jeux coopératifs et en utilisant les fichiers...

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader’s ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

This paper examines the efficiency of decentralized leadership where regional governments contribute to the provision of multiple regional and national public goods. Unlimited decentralized leadership is inefficient because regional governments have incentives to overspend resources in the...

We analyze how a contest organizer chooses optimally the winner when the contestants’ efforts are already exerted and commitment to the use of a given contest success function is not possible. We define the notion of rationalizability in mixed-strategies to capture such a situation. Our...

In recent years, one of the most frequently debated issues in Congress has been the value of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) relative to the U.S. dollar. Many members of Congress often accuse China of being a “currency manipulator.” This paper has two objectives. First, it investigates the extent...

Political economy theories on the “natural resource curse” predict that natural resource wealth is a determining factor for the length of time political leaderships remain in office. Whether resource wealth leads to longer or shorter durations in political office depends on the political...

Voter education campaigns often aim to increase political participation and accountability. We followed a randomized campaign against electoral violence sponsored by an international NGO during the 2007 Nigerian elections. This paper investigates whether the effects of the campaign were...

The secret ballot was designed to eliminate the incentive for candidates to purchase votes through direct vote buying. When voters have private information on their candidate preferences, incumbent candidates will generally be less efficient in purchasing votes than their challengers. Incumbent...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of bureaucratic friction in a bureaucratic contest with (<InlineEquation ID="Equ1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX"><![CDATA[$n \ge 2$]]></EquationSource> </InlineEquation>) and without (n=1) rent contestability. When n= 1 bureaucratic impediments induce the individual to undertake rent-securing activities at the same level as in the two-player...</equationsource></inlineequation>

Aging changes the political power in a democracy in favor of the older generations. With free labor mobility like that of the EU, the success of the gerontocracy is, nevertheless, limited by migration of the young generations. This connection between political voting and voting with the feet is...