We posit that the fiscal behavior of Argentine provinces is determined by a common pool game at two levels: within each province, and across political units. In the latter game, the national government has a greater incentive than the provincial governments to internalize the negative...

This paper addresses an important source of variation within democracies – the degree of institutionalization. The concept of institutionalization describes the extent to which politics takes place, and is believed to take place, via formal political institutions. Countries vary in their...

This paper is concerned with the characteristics, determinants and consequences of varying levels of congressional institutionalization. Our work can be traced back to the early work on congressional institutionalization done by Polsby (1968), which is complemented here by the game-theoretic...

Countries with different levels of state capacity have access to different sets of policies. In particular, countries with strong state capabilities are able to draw from a broader menu of policies, and pick and successfully implement those policies that best suit the nature of their challenges....

We review the experiences of developing countries with market-oriented reforms, using the tools of modern political economy. We impose intellectual discipline by requiring that actors behave rationally using available information and that basic economic relationschips such as budget constraints...

We analyze the dynamics of inflation that arise from fiscal deficits caused by the noncooperative behavior of interest groups. The "state" variable is the degree of financial adaptation, a proxy for the share of wealth agents hold in alternatives to domestic currency. As financial adaptation...