The authors study how the difference between federal and unitary systems of government can contribute to variations in economic volatility across democracies.

Democratic elections increasingly involve political intermediaries (e.g. grassroots organizations or political brokers). We develop a model of electoral competition in which candidates must decide between brokers (patronage) and grassroots organizations. Our model shows that patronage is more...

This paper explores potential inefficiencies due to incomplete contracts in a dynamic career concerns context. In a firm--worker relationship, the worker performs tasks that have tradeoffs between productivity and information about the worker's ability. We focus on task choices with no private...

Empirical studies have documented non-instrumental motives for voting. However, the theoretical literature on strategic voting has largely ignored these motives. In this paper, we examine voter behavior in multi-candidate elections in the presence of ethical, expressive, and instrumental...

Voters in the U.S. and elsewhere have become highly polarized. How does this impact policymaking? We provide a theory to examine this question in the context of distributive politics and find that polarization can have a non-monotonic effect on equity. Political turnover and the inter-temporal...

Theories of political accountability typically focus on voter-politician relationships. However, overall government performance depends on both elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats. Politicians are agents of voters while serving as principals to bureaucrats. We develop a model of...

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...