The citizen-candidate approach, proposed to study the performance of representative democracies, builds on a multi-stage game where the same agents are asked whether or not to become a candidate and, successively, to vote. Consistently, the solution concept adopted in Besley and Coate (1997)...

We prove that for generic plurality games with positive cost of voting, the number of Nash equilibria is finite. Furthermore all the equilibria are regular, hence stable sets as singletons.

n this paper we show that in a simple spatial model where the government is chosen under strict proportional rule, if the outcome function is a linear combination of parties' positions, with coefficient equal to their share of votes, essentially only a two-party equilibrium exists. The two...

This paper presents a model where societies whose population expands, experience advances in specialization at the cost of diluted monitoring, which limits enforcement and hinders trade possibilities. Cash and private circulating instruments can replace monitoring. Advances in specialization may...

This paper addresses the "rate of return" puzzle of monetary theory. Similarly to the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money, we assume that Government bonds are subject to a minimum purchase requirement. Differently from this theory, however, we assume that intermediaries, when...

We propose a model in which money performs an essential role in the process of exchange, despite the presence of a multilateral clearing house. Agents are assumed to be anonymous and unable to make binding commitments. The clearing house can detect deviations but it cannot identify the...