We investigate the Baron and Ferejohn (1989) noncooperative game theoretic bargaining model of legislative equilibrium. Legislative outcomes are sensitive to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be voted on. With a random proposal recognition rule and a closed...

A theoretical model relates case mix, staffing, and monitoring to the likelihood of a plea agreement. Analysis of federal drug trafficking cases in fiscal years 1993 through 1996 leads to the following conclusions: There are fewer pleas in districts that are understaffed and are facing more...

A long-standing unsolved problem, often arising from auctions with multidimensional bids, is how to design seller-optimal auctions when bidders' private characteristics differ in many dimensions. This paper partially solves the problem in an auction setting with characteristics stochastically...

Suppose a developer wants to buy n adjacent blocks of land that are currently in the possession of n different owners. The value of the blocks of land to the developer is greater than the sum of the individual values of the blocks for each owner. Under complete information about individual...

This paper studies the impact of the competition between lobbies and voters on policy outcomes. Lobbies offer payments to policy makers and citizens offer votes. At the beginning of the game a policy maker is exogeneously put in place. Then government, lobby and voters interact in two stages....

A standard result in the literature on monetary policy rules is that of certainty equivalence: given the expected values of all the state variables of the economy, policy should be set in a way that is independent of all higher moments of those variables. Some exceptions to this rule have been...

This paper applies Bayesian variable selection methods from the statistics literature to give guidance in the decision to include/omit factors in a global (linear factor) stock return model. Once one has accounted for country and sector, it is possible to see which style or styles best explains...

This paper describes the signaling that occurred in many of the FCC spectrum auctions. The FCC's simultaneous ascending auctions allowed bidders to bid on numerous communication licenses simultaneously, with bidding remaining open on all licenses until no bidder was willing to raise the bid on...

There has been an increasing interest in hypothesis testing with inequality restrictions. An important example in time series econometrics is hypotheses on autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH). We propose a one-sided test for ARCH using the wavelet method, a new analytic tool...

The lack of well-defined property rights causes the Tragedy of the Commons. Transferring common property to local communities for management has become the primary prescription for eliminating the incentives driving the Tragedy. Building community institutions to manage local resources is a...