This Paper contributes ideas and analysis to the ongoing EU reform debate. It consists of three distinct parts: voting in the Council of Ministers, restructuring the ECB's Governing Council, and the setting of enlargement “examination” dates. The IGC currently focuses on Council voting,...

This Paper studies some of the many options facing EU leaders when choosing a viable voting system for the EU25+. It provides quantitative estimates of the efficiency and power distributions of the various EU voting schemes that are being considered. It also provides intuition on how various...

The phenomenon of choice shifts in group decision-making is fairly ubiquitous in the social psychology literature. Faced with a choice between a ‘safe’ and ‘risky’ decision, group members appear to move to one extreme or the other, relative to the choices each member might have made...

This paper analyzes a model in which different rational individuals vote over the composition and time profile of public spending. Potential disagreement between current and future majorities generates instability in the social choice function that aggregates individual preferences. In...

It is argued that trigger mechanisms cannot support reputation if voters are atomistic and have access to good information about party preferences. Therefore the choice for a party lies between precommitment, enforced by penalties, and discretion. The paper uses a model of Labor and Conservative...

We present identification and estimation results for the 'collective' model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and non-participation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied...

We examine a stark setting in which security or protection can be provided by self-governing groups of by for-profit entrepreneurs: kings, lords, or mafia dons. Though self-governance is best for the population, it faces problems of long-term viability. Typically, in providing security the...

The paper studies the political and economic determinants of inter-regional public transfers. It points to an important difference between two alternative federal fiscal constitutions. The paper shows that inter-regional transfers can be determined either by a federation-wide vote over a...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

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...