In the fields of social choice, public choice and political economics, the main difference between private and political choice is whether individual preferences are aggregated to make a decision. A much less studied difference is whether beliefs are aggregated to make a decision. In this paper,...

We model `money buys access' informational lobbying as a commitment from the policy-maker to observe a lobby's verifiable evidence only upon receiving an access fee. We specifically examine the policy-maker's optimal access fees in the presence of two strictly competing lobbies. Our novel method...

We study a game in which a sender with verifiable private information has to pay an access fee that is announced by a receiver to be able to convey her message to the receiver. The setting is motivated by the literature of pay-and-lobby politics, which finds that politicians decide to schedule...

The Anglo-American double-member districts employing plurality-at-large are frequently criticized for giving a large majority premium to a winning party, since the large premium may decrease proportionality of the elected assembly relative to single-member districts. We demonstrate that the...

In this paper we examine a class of local crimes that involve perfectly mobile criminals, and perfectly immobile criminal opportunities. We focus on local non-rival crime deterrence that is more efficient against criminals pursuing domestic crimes than criminals pursuing crimes elsewhere. In a...

Common wisdom dictates that fiscal governance (i.e. procedural fiscal rules) improves fiscal discipline. We rather find that selected fiscal constraints protect the coalitional status quo from logrolling. In effect, fiscal governance may deteriorate fiscal position. In political economy with...

We extend a model of wasteful state aid in Dewatripont and Seabright (2006, Journal of the European Economic Association 4, 513--522) by a supranational controlling authority. The model combines moral hazard and adverse selection to show that politicians fund wasteful projects to signal their...

We survey the state-of-the-art methods of how to rank economic departments on the basis of a sample of 14 studies conducted in years 1995-2005. We cover a diversity of rankings: U.S., worldwide, E.U., those of developed academic nations and those of developing academic nations. Each method rests...

If local public goods exhibit spillovers and regions are sufficiently symmetric, decentralization implies underprovision, whereas cooperative centralization is associated with strict Pareto-improvement. This classic inference rests on two assumptions: local politicians are delegated sincerely...

When nominal wage rigidity is large, and banking sector oligopolistic, the benevolent government may prefer to regulate interest rates to boost labor demand. A government of a transition economy may postpone bank privatization to keep credit provision under control, as long as inefficiencies of...