Partisan voters are optimistic about electoral outcomes: their estimates of the probability of electoral success for their party or candidate are substantially higher than the average among the electorate. This has large potential implications for political bargaining. Optimism about future...

In this paper we study the functioning of representative democracy when politicians are better informed than the electorate about conditions relevant for policy choice. We consider a model with two states of the world. The distribution of voters preferred policies shifts with the state. The two...

This paper analyses a tax reform, explicitly conceived by policy makers to be climate-friendly, that partly replaces a high vehicle registration tax by road user charging and allows for differentiation of the remaining registration tax by fuel efficiency. A microeconomic framework is proposed to...