A key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor-market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market. The authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers' beliefs about the productivity of minority...

This paper presents a political economy theory of fiscal policy. Policy choices are made by a legislature that can raise revenues via an income tax and by borrowing. Revenues can be used to finance a public good, whose value is stochastic, and pork-barrel spending. Policymaking cycles between a...

This paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies. It extends the citizen-candidate model of democratic policy-making to a dynamic environment. Equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that, in each period, conditional on future policies...

This paper explores a group rule–utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout, inspired by the theoretical work of John C. Harsanyi (1980) and Timothy J. Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni (2002). It develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in...

This paper argues that campaign finance policy, in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing, can be Pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters. The optimistic assumptions are that...

This paper shows that altruism provides an efficiency rationale for public provision of insurance to the poor. The framework is one in which there are rich altruists and risk-averse poor who face some possibility of loss. The government represents the rich and makes transfers on their behalf....