We present a theory of endogenous political regimes that emphasizes overseas investments and that foreign governments may either induce regime transitions or promote regime consolidations. In our theory, foreign intervention is driven by the interaction between strategic foreign investments and...

This paper investigates the role of performance voting in solving the capital levy problem. In a representative democracy, voters can use elections to protect their property by holding politicians accountable for the tax policies they implement. We characterize the set of tax policies that can...

This paper considers trade policies in a small open economy in which two influential interest groups lobby the government. Since competitive lobbying leads to excess rent-seeking expenditures, the lobbies have an incentive to cooperate. The outcome of cooperative lobbying is characterized in...

The purpose of this paper is to study formation of support and opposition to redistribution. We analyze a society with two groups of citizens and a government. The government distributes income from one group to the other in response to political pressure. The interaction between the groups is...

This paper proposes a model of workplace-specific unions that integrates two views of what unions do. One view holds that unions mainly engage in rent extraction. Another view holds that unions mainly engage in rent creation by providing agency services that increase workplace productivity. We...