We study democratization, coups and trade policy determination in an environment marked by intra-elite conflict over trade policy by taking a simple general equilibrium model of an open economy and combining it with the Acemoglu-Robinson model of democratization. Unlike the approaches taken in...

Under asymmetric information, dishonest sellers lead to market unraveling in the lemons model. An additional cost of dishonesty is that language becomes cheap talk. We develop instead a model where people derive utility from actions (what they say), as well as from outcomes, so talk is costly....

Natural language is a shared social convention that allows hearers to understand speakers. We model this using two steps. First, an encoding-decoding step where the sender transmits verbal information to the receiver. Second, an inferential step where the receiver may either believe the literal...

This paper studies how a society should optimally organize and regulate its media industry. First, a political economy model of the media industry is developed. Second, a constitutional stage is considered and the optimal regulation of the industry is deduced. A simple but powerful normative...

Two types of political conflicts of interest pervade many of the world's societies. A horizontal conflict of interest arises when different constituencies support different policies, while a vertical conflict of interest emerges when those in charge of running the government acquire and retain...

Specialization and trade rest on institutions that protect property rights and enforce agreements. Frequently, in economic analysis institutions are just assumed to exist, or it is implicitly supposed that the political game can establish them. Once this assumption is done, the invisible hand...