These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.
In political organizations, the process of developing new policies often involves competing policy entrepreneurs who make productive investments to make their proposals more appealing to decisionmakers. We analyze how entrepreneurs extremism and costs of crafting...
Policy-making is a dynamic process in which policies can be changed in each period but continue in the absence of new legislation. We study a dynamic legislative bargaining game with an endogenous status quo where...
Fixed statutes and regulations often have variable consequences over time. If left unattended, such drift can severely erode the performance of government as an institution of representation. To better understand the mechanics of policy-making in...
Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their partisan...
The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have...
The role of deliberation among citizens to determine and forge agreement on policy is often seen as a crucial feature of democratic government. This paper provides the first large-N empirical evidence on the credibility of...
This paper illustrates a practical framework for understanding and predicting political economy risk for project managers operating in a variety of developing country settings, including non-democracies, ethnically diverse environments and societies undergoing political transition. In...
Can combat experience foster organizational skills that engender political collective action? We use the arbitrary assignment of troops to frontline combat in World War 2 to identify the effect of combat experience on two channels...
We introduce a model in which firms trade goods via bilateral contracts which specify a buyer, a seller, and the terms of the exchange. This setting subsumes (many-to-many) matching with contracts, as well as supply...
This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a governing coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policies. Equilibria can involve active lobbying...
We examine the question of how competition between governments within metropolitan areas affects economic growth outcomes. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we find that the number of county governments...
According to what criteria do citizens make political decisions, and what do these criteria say about democratic competence? An impressive body of evidence suggests that voters competently evaluate diagnostic information such as macroeconomic trends and...
This paper estimates a three-equation structural model based on a theory that relates corporate financial performance (CFP), corporate social performance (CSP), and social pressure. CFP is found to be independent of CSP and decreasing in...
One consequence of the proliferation of vote-by-mail (VBM) in certain areas of the United States is the opportunity for voters to cast ballots weeks before Election Day. Understanding the ensuing effects of VBM on late...
A key challenge for developing societies is to build coalitions across disparate interests in favour of beneficial policies. This paper documents the role of a financial innovation- shares- in aligning disparate interests in favour of...
This paper analyses the incentives that shaped Hindu and Muslim interaction in India's towns from the rise of Islam to the rise of European intervention in the 17th century; it argues that differences in the...
This paper presents a dynamic model of election, government formation, and legislation in a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation in which the policy chosen in one period becomes the status quo for the next period...
We show that federalism will lead to higher economic growth. We present a model of endogenous growth where government services, funded by income and capital taxes, are a component of production. In this model a...
This paper presents a positive theory of corporate social responsibility set in a managerial capitalism context in which managers instead of markets allocate resources, including social expenditures. The theory focuses jointly on the operational management...
Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic indicators...
