We consider renegotiation of social earnings insurance arrangements by majority voting in an economy where ex-ante identical individuals make unobservable private investments in education. We show that voting-based renegotiation can result in a higher expected level of investment in comparison...

The thesis of this paper is that more transparent, rule-bound and subtle mechanisms for policy coordination will be needed to ensure the success of an enlarged European Union. A common policy is a public good with distributional implications. Economists have developed a large number of plausible...

We consider a two-period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ by age and by productivity. In such a setting, a redistributive Pay-As-You-Go system is politically sustainable, even when the interest rate is larger than the rate of population growth. The workers with...

This paper surveys some recent literature on fiscal policy and comparative politics. Economic policy is viewed as the outcome of a game with multiple-principals and multiple-agents. Opportunistic politicians bargain over policy. Rational voters hold them accountable through retrospective voting....

This paper studies majority voting over non-linear income taxes when individuals respond to taxation by substituting untaxable leisure to taxable labor. We first show that voting cycle over progressive and regressive taxes is inevitable. This is because the middle-class can always lower its tax...

In this note we discuss two examples of appoval voting games. The first one, with six voters and three candidates, has a unique stable set,where each voter approves only his most preferred candidate. This strategy coincides with the sophisticated one, while other strategy combinations, leading...