Small U.S. states are over-represented in the Senate and over-weighted in the electoral college. Atlas et al. (1995) have drawn attention to the effect of the over-representation of small states in the Senate by showing that per capita federal expenditure is positively related to per capita...

Several empirical papers have established the fact of a negative price-output correlation for the United States in the post WWII era. Much of this work appears to interpret the sign of this correlation under the assumption that monetary policy is passive. This paper uses a simple aggregate...

We investigate policy reform in a model with both lobbying, which involves a free-rider problem, and ordinary rent seeking, which does not. These activities involve similar skills, so a reform which reduces rents shifts labor into lobbying. Also, because of the free-rider problem, the marginal...

In a standard rent-seeking contest, players optimally employ resources in an attempt to obtain the rent. Typically, it is assumed that these resources may be hired at any desired level at some exogenous per-unit cost. In practice, these resources often consist of scarce, talented individuals. We...

Congress approved the superconducting supercollider (SSC), but later cut all funding after construction for the project had begun. We claim that this reversal was due, in part, to a problem of time inconsistency. Representatives from states in contention to receive the project had an incentive...

We conduct an experimental analysis of bargaining under asymmetric information, where the dispute resolution mechanism can be interpreted as either a civil trial or conventional arbitration. In our treatment, we allow for credible and costless transmission of private information. Consistent with...

Pecorino (1998) models tariff lobbying in a repeated game and finds that cooperation can be maintained in a large group, even though tariff lobbying provides a rival public good to interest group members. We add small fixed costs of participation to this model and find that cooperation must...

As pointed out by Krueger (1993a, 1993b), changes in policy which are exogenous to the lobbying process may lead to a vicious cycle of protectionism. A sector which receives protection will tend to grow, thereby increasing the constituency for greater protection and reducing the constituency...