When do resource revenues increase corruption? I develop a model of public good provision by a politician who obtains rents by stealing government revenues or extracting bribes in exchange for public goods spending. I show there is a threshold level of revenues below which the politician does...

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits US firms from paying bribes to foreign public officials. We show that FCPA enforcement has no positive effect on the GDP per capita of the countries of these officials but, rather, increases their countries’ shadow economy. When public...

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

Magna Carta, a pivotal moment in the emergence of constitutional government, institutionalised constraints on royal power. We depict it as an optimal agreement between two coalitions capable of violence: the king's loyal coalition of barons and the rebel barons. This type of agreement is more...

The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits the payment of bribes to foreign public officials. We uncover an unintended consequence – the shadow economies of the countries of these officials increase after FCPA enforcement. Our hypothesis is that if the FCPA successfully deters...

The political economy of medieval Europe was shaped by alliances between lords and vassals, forged through peaceful and violent means. We model coalition formation through bargaining or by conquest, and where members can rebel against their coalition. We derive conditions under which a realm...

Using spatial Poisson processes, we re-interpret the Imitation Dynamics and show how the spatial clustering of players affects both the selection of strategies and the speed by which they replicate. We find that the more clustered are the players, (a) the faster the evolution of strategies and...

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

When do citizens tolerate corrupt, but competent, politicians? This paper formally establishes conditions under which citizens trade off corruption for competence. First, the regime has to be sufficiently democratic such that a corrupt politician has to bargain with citizens in order to stay in...