In this paper we investigate the introduction of an export tax on steam coal levied by an individual country (Australia), or a group of major exporting countries. The policy motivation would be twofold: generating tax revenues against the background of improved terms-of-trade, while CO2...

A great challenge for capitalist development under authoritarian regimes is to effectively constrain predatory behavior. Beyond existing frameworks of the dictator's time horizon and institutionalized power sharing, we introduce an alternative perspective - elite cleavage. We argue that the...

A growing literature shows robust evidence that patronage by high level politicians greatly enhanced officials' chance of promotion in the largest one-party dictatorship in the world, China. There has been few works on whether patrons' exits, even when they were retirements, had an impact on a...

Non-democracies are seen as inherently unstable because of the high frequency of irregular and often-violent leadership turnovers. Our tractable stochastic game model investigates authoritarian stability and instability by portraying a world in which dictators are forced to tolerate threatening...

The literature suggests that dictators allocate resources to loyal supporters and protect them from political attacks. However, it has not distinguished between the dictator’s resource allocation and rational allocation by economic actors in anticipation of a new leader. We theorize that...

Chinese party-state’s response to coronavirus outbreak has gone through two phases so far: the information suppression phase in the beginning of the crisis and the mobilization phase later aimed at containing the pandemic’s spread. The CCP achieved key objectives in both phases owing to the...