Using the texts of the People’s Daily, an official publication of the Communist Party of China, the author shows that the socialist alliance between China and North Korea has significantly weakened since the Korean War.

Although the U.S. has a more progressive tax system than many other high-income countries, its overall fiscal system does less to reduce inequality because its tax system is smaller (OECD 2008). What societal preferences can explain these cross-country differences? We address this question by...

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

Businesses are "burdened" by government through corporate taxes and bureaucratic procedures. We interpret these two channels as tools for raising revenue and study, theoretically and empirically, how different political institutions rely on these tools. We establish two stylized facts: the...

The authors develop a quantitative indicator of the Chinese government's policy priorities over a long period of time, which they call the Policy Change Index (PCI) of China.

We have developed a quantitative indicator to predict if and when a series of protests in China, such as the one that began in Hong Kong in 2019, will be met with a Tiananmen-like crackdown. The indicator takes as input protest-related articles published in the People's Daily—the official...

For the first time in the literature, we develop a quantitative indicator of the Chinese government's policy priorities over a long period of time, which we call the Policy Change Index (PCI) for China. The PCI is a leading indicator of policy changes that covers the period from 1951 to the...

We present a framework of group cooperation and competition in which agents are concerned not only about their material payoffs but also about their psychological payoffs, derived from working with others per se. In such a framework, a group's psychological preferences serve to enhance the...