If a government has ability and willingness to redistribute the surplus created by an external investor, why do we still observe resistance to such investment, sometimes in the form of destruction of productive assets? And how does such destructive action affect a government's...

We study a political competition between two groups, where the winner has the decision rights to allocate resources, like political parties deciding on sharing of patronage goods. What factors determine how resources are shared? We highlight an important force that affects distribution of...

We study the role of inter-group differences in the emergence of conflict. In our setting, society comprises two groups who compete in every period for political power, i.e. the right to allocate economic resources between the groups. Individuals can move from one group to another at a cost:...

In developing countries with weak enforcement institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on electoral incentives to reduce corruption. In this paper we study the effect of electoral competition on corruption when uncertainty in elections is high, as in many developing countries. Our...

We introduce voter uncertainty to the unidimensional spatial model of elections. Strategic voters choose between the status quo and a proposed reform, and there is uncertainty about the location of the reform on the policy space. If each possible location of the reform is on the same side of the...

An individual is characterized by several ascriptive markers like race, religion, language and so on. In this paper, we provide a general theory of how one dimension of identity, or a composite of several dimensions becomes politically salient. In our model, exogenous institutional or...

In this paper we study the effect of electoral competition on corruption. Our theory shows that when electoral uncertainty is high, as is expected in many developing countries, there is a U-shaped relationship between electoral competition and corruption. We illustrate the predictions of the...

We study the role of inter-group differences in the emergence of conflict. In our setting, two groups compete for the right to allocate societys resources, and we allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, that the opposition can either accept, or reject and...