. We allow politicians to choose any tax rate between zero and unity and then redistribute the money collected. We build on …

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their …. Second, voters can exploit the signalling behavior of politicians by precommitting to a higher threshold for signals received …. Raising the threshold discourages signalling effort by low quality politicians but encourages effort by high quality …

whether or not they are a curse. We show: (1) politicians tend to over-extract natural resources relative to the efficient …) resource booms, however, by raising the value of being in power and by providing politicians with more resources which they can …