An individual is characterized by several ascriptive markers like race, religion, language and so on. In this paper, we provide a general theory of how one dimension of identity, or a composite of several dimensions becomes politically salient. In our model, exogenous institutional or...

We study the role of inter-group differences in the emergence of conflict. In our setting, two groups compete for the right to allocate society's resources, and we allow for costly inter-group mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, that the opposition can either accept, or reject and...

Poor communities sometimes resist private investment and destroy economic surplus even if the government has the willingness and ability to redistribute. We interpret such acts of resistance as demands for redistribution: destruction contains credible information about how affected groups value...

We provide a simple condition that is both necessary and sufficient for aggregation of private information in large elections where all voters have the same preference. In some states of the world, all voters prefer A; and in other states, all voters prefer B. Each voter draws a private signal...

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences. Rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions. If voting is compulsory, then voters may find it rational to vote...

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting mechanisms. Theory predicts that these different mechanisms have different implications both for the sincerity of the voting decisions and for the participation decisions of voters, and we find strong support for these...