We analyze a psychologically-based model of voter turnout in an election with common value and uncertainty. Our model yields distinctive comparative statics results. First, an increase in the proportion of informed citizens may cause the winning margin for the right candidate to either rise or...

We study a sender's optimal choice of precision when he selects from a class of random signals to persuade a receiver to accept his request, with higher costs associated with higher precision. The receiver observes both the precision and a random realization of the signal. We characterize...

Is increasing political competition good for voters? We study this question in the political career concerns framework. Our results show that the relationship between political competition, viewed as the cost of challenging incumbent politicians, and the politicians' incentive to behave in the...

In this paper we endogenize the number and characteristics of lobbies in a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy where citizens can lobby an elected policy-maker. We find that lobbying always matters. That is, lobbying always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. Moreover, only one...

This paper presents and investigates a new data set of individual residential property transactions in England. The main novelty of the data is the record of all listing price changes and all offers made on a property, as well as all the visits by potential buyers for a subset of the properties....

Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

This paper studies the nonparametric identification and estimation of voters' preferences when voters are ideological. We establish that voter preference distributions and other parameters of interest can be identified from aggregate electoral data. We also show that these objects can be...

In this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies. Our analysis accounts for the following observed phenomena: (1) Cabinet reshuffles; (2) Cabinet replacements; (3) Early elections; (4) Surplus governments; (5) Minority governments;...