We present a model in which a government's current capital controls policy signals future policies. Controls on capital outflows evolve in response to news on technology, conditional on government attitudes towards taxation of capital. When there is uncertainty over government types, a policy of...

We present a model where policies of free capital mobility can signal governments' future policies, but the informativeness of the signal depends on the path of world interest rates. Capital flows to emerging markets reflect investors' perception of these markets' political risk. With low world...

Recent large-scale replications of social science experiments provide important information on the reliability of experimental research. Unfortunately, there exist no mechanisms to ensure replications are done. We propose such a mechanism: journal-based replication, in which the publishing...

We consider a model in which the level of taxes and seignorage are too low to finance government expenditures and debt service. Government debt will therefore grow without bound, implying the eventual need to change policy. Starting with utility maximization, we analyze the effect of the...

Conventional wisdom is that good economic conditions or expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get re-elected, but this has not been tested in a large cross-section of countries. We test these arguments in a sample of 74 countries over the period 1960-2003. We find no evidence that deficits...

The perceived importance of "special interest group" money in election campaigns motivates widespread use of caps on allowable contributions. We present a bargaining model in which putting a cap that is not too stringent on the size of the contribution a lobby can make improves its bargaining...

We use the concepts of deliberative democracy from political science and cheap talk from economics to develop a better understanding of how public discussion can contribute to building and demonstrating ownership of IMF programs and hence to program success. We argue that ownership is more...

We present a bargaining model of the interaction between a government and interest groups in which, unlike most existing models, neither side is assumed to have all the bargaining power. The government finds it optimal to constrain itself in the use of transfer policies to improve its bargaining...

Firms' beliefs that they may be unable to sell as much as they would like at the market price leads not only to a quantity spillover (even when prices are flexible) but also to a spillover of product demand elasticity onto the elasticity of labor demand. Hence, optimal firm behavior can be...

Existing models of contagious currency crises are summarized and surveyed, and it is argued that more weight should be put on political factors. Towards this end, the concept of political contagion introduced, whereby contagion in speculative attacks across currencies arises solely because of...