International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate...

We examine a model in which the public is unsure about the competence of a politician, and whether they are concerned about the long-term consequences of their decisions (statesman) or about the public’s opinion concerning their competence and preferences (populist). The main finding suggests...

How can a non-democratic ruler provide proper incentives for state bureaucracy? In the absence of competitive elections and separation of powers, the ruler has to be well-informed himself, and to gather information he may use either a secret service or the media. The danger of using a secret...

What are the main causes of international terrorism? The lessons from the surge of academic research that followed 9/11 remain elusive. The careful investigation of the relative roles of economic and political conditions did little to change the fact that existing econometric estimates diverge...

We study a class of representation mechanisms, based on reports made by a random subset of agents, called representatives, in a collective choice problem with quasi-linear utilities. We do not assume the existence of a common prior probability describing the distribution of preference types. In...

This Paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between officeholder and an electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the officeholder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has...

Reducing fixed cost duplication - a common justification for concentrated market structure - motivated the US government to relax the number of radio stations a firm could operate in any local market. After deregulation the number of firms per market decreased. The implied cost saving depends on...

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics In this paper we survey recent developments on economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market...

This paper examines the relationship between fiscal policy and the current account, drawing on a larger country sample than in previous studies and using panel regressions, vector auto-regressions, and an analysis of large fiscal and external adjustments. On average, a strengthening in the...

This paper describes how we constructed a real-time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...