Some of today's most heated policy debates about Brexit, trade wars, climate change abatement, and migration involve redistribution of resources within a given country (national redistribution) and between countries (global redistribution). Nevertheless, theories and evidence on preferences for...

We conduct laboratory experiments where third-party spectators can redistribute resources between two agents, thereby eliminating inequality and offsetting the consequences of controllable and uncontrollable luck. Some spectators go to the limits and equalize all or no inequalities, but many...

The meritocratic fairness ideal implies that inequalities in earnings are regarded as fair only when they reflect differences in performance. Consequently, implementation of the meritocratic fairness ideal requires complete information about individual performances, but in practice, such...

Most people regard inequalities as more acceptable when they reflect differences in effort, rather than differences in luck. In practice however, effort and luck are often intertwined. We study redistributive behavior in a situation where it is common knowledge that luck completely determines...

This paper analyzes the constitutional history of China, with the aim of explaining how and why the policies that produced its rapid growth came to be adopted. The paper argues that constitutional reforms played important roles in China's economic development and are likely to do so in the...

The literature on political business cycles follows two analytical conventions: (1) polity is reasonably reduced to a single agent who is either opportunistic or partisan and (2) economy is an equilibrated entity that is subject to politically inspired shocks. This paper pursues a different...

This paper explores a possible path toward dissolving an antinomy within political economy: market order is treated as emergent and spontaneous while political order is treated as planned. This paper pursues a path that seeks to locate the entire social order as emergent and spontaneous. Where a...

We document the effectiveness of robo calls for increasing voter participation despite most published research finding little or no effect of automated calls. We establish this finding in a large field experiment in a targeted, partisan get-out-the-vote campaign. Our experimental design includes...

This paper is written for a Liberty Fund conference on 'Liberty in relation to law and macroeconomics'. The paper works with recognition that the models we use are not neutral devices to see more clearly into reality because they also shade that reality in different ways. For instance, a model...

We argue that standard models that solve the paradox of voting do a bad job explaining the frequency of very close elections. We instead model head-to-head elections as a competition between incentive schemes to turn out voters. We show that elections are either heavily contested, and decided by...