This paper studies the impact of the competition between lobbies and voters on policy outcomes under alternative legislative procedures. Lobbies and citizens have opposing interests in a public policy and offer money and votes, respectively, to legislators to obtain their preferred policy....

The welfare economic method for analyzing the case for government intervention is often critized for ignoring the political determination of policies. The standard method of accounting for this critique studies the case for intervention under the constraint that the level of the instrument in...

When considering engaging in conflict to secure control of a resource, a group needs to predict the amount of post-conflict leakage due to infiltration by members of losing groups. We use this insight to explain why conflict often takes place along ethnic lines, why some ethnic groups are more...

In a world where rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of a signal. We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by a signal, and provide necessary and...

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (information controller) can influence voters’ choices by designing the information content of a public signal. We characterize the controller’s optimal signal. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by...

We study the mechanisms through which the adoption of the Euro delayed, rather than advanced, economic reforms in the Euro zone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the reform process and the institutional...

Under sequential voting, voting late enables conditioning on which candidates are viable, while voting early can influence the field of candidates. But the latter effect can be harmful: shrinking the field increases not only the likelihood that future voters vote for one's favorite candidate,...

This paper analyses whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after their rise to power in 1933. Using data on public employment in the armed forces, public administrations and related professions from the German occupational censuses in 1925, 1933 and...

In this paper I analyze the effect of the transparency of the decision making process in committees on the decisions that are eventually taken. I focus on committees whose members are motivated by career concerns, so that each member tries to enhance his own reputation. When the decision making...