Labor immobility (high adjustment cost) has been regarded as a major obstacle to trade liberalization, and it has been argued that higher labor mobility promotes trade liberalization. However, this is not the case when we take into account conflicts of interests between politicians and voters...

There often exists a supermajority rule that enables the minority party to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. I construct a two-period model consisting of a representative voter, self-interested parties, and a media outlet. In the model, the majority party has an incentive to misrepresent the...

Expectation formation about future trade liberalization induces sectoral adjustment in advance and so the number of opposition decreases and trade liberalization can be self-fulfilling. We analyze this expectation formation mechanism in political process from two aspects: population aging and...

We construct a model in which an incumbent and a challenger decide whether to focus on policy or ability in electoral campaigning, and a media outlet then decides whether to gather news. We show that a candidate's strategy on which issue to focus on (i.e., campaign messages) can be a signal...

In majoritarian legislatures, minority parties cannot directly influence policymaking. However, they may serve as whistleblowers against the majority parties' harmful policymaking. This study aims to explore whether a minority party's monitoring mitigates a political agency problem in a...

This study examines how an endogenous change in political trust affects the performance of a representative democracy. To this end, we construct a two-period political agency model in which voters face uncertainty about the distribution of politicians' types (model uncertainty) as well as each...

Overconfident people who do not earn what they think they can may attribute this negative gap to the unfairness of the economy and thereby favor reducing income inequality when they realize their income-ability gap. We conducted an online survey experiment in the US in which we assigned the...

To explore the propagation of populist extremism across countries, we construct a multi-country model wherein each country's politician sequentially implements a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by observing foreign policies on top of the domestic...