In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents have heterogeneous preferences that are interpersonally noncomparable. We first show that even if all agents share the same preferences, there is a conflict between the axioms of Pareto principle, time consistency, and...

Cities increasingly address climate change, e.g. by pledging city-level emission reduction targets. This is puzzling for the provision of a global public good: what are city governments' reasons for doing so, and do pledges actually translate into emission reductions? Empirical studies have...

The concept of the Condorcet winner has become central to most electoral models in the political economy literature. A Condorcet winner is the alternative preferred by a plurality in every pairwise competition; the notion of a k-winner generalizes that of a Condorcet winner. The k-winner is the...

I introduce a model of shareholder voting. I describe and provide characterizations of three families of shareholder voting rules: ratio rules, difference rules, and share majority rules. The characterizations rely on two key axioms: merger consistency, which requires consistency in voting...

We axiomatically study voting rules without making any assumption on the ballots that voters are allowed to cast. In this setting, we characterize the family of ''endorsement rules", which includes approval voting and the plurality rule, via the imposition of three normative conditions. The...

Economic models of democratic decision-making tend to assume that voters have preferences and politicians adjust their platforms to conform to voter preferences. However, the direction of causation (mostly) goes the other way. Political elites offer policy platforms and voters adopt the policy...

This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics...

Radial symmetry, by our definition, is a precise condition on continuous ideal-point distributions, rarely if ever found exactly in practice, that is similar to the classical 1967 symmetry condition of Plott but pertains to an infinite electorate; the bivariate normal distribution provides an...

The Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) used by the Council of the European Union developed to a high degree of complexity from one modifying treaty to another, until the latest definition stipulated in the Treaty of Lisbon. This paper analyses this EU intra-institutional voting method using a...

Using rural household survey data from West Bengal, we find that voters respond positively to excludable government welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with these voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced...