I construct a model of public policy development, and use the model to explain why the United States has a comparatively small public sector, but instead a large "private welfare state" with employment-based benefits. The key factors are politically organized firms and labor unions. These...

In newly democratized and developing countries, political economy theory expects politicians to use budget defcits to engineer an election-timed boom, known as the political business cycle. In this paper, we challenge this view by incorporating the Önancial constraints faced by government into...

We propose a new methodology to measure and to study worker mobility across occupations and jobs in US Census data at the monthly frequency. Our approach builds on two main ideas. First, we use the longitudinal dimension of matched monthly CPS files to evaluate each occupational transition in...

The notion of state capacity has attracted renewed interest over the last few years, in particular in the study of violent conflict. Yet, state capacity is conceived differently depending on whether the interest lies in the state's power to discourage violent conflict, in its ability to...

We develop a model of data provision and data pricing in an environment with strategically interacting firms. The demand for data is generated by firms which seek to tailor their product positioning, or price, to either the individual or the aggregate demand. In turn, the data provider...

We find that sequential division of labor and deadlines help alleviate the free rider problem. Conversely,indivisibility of tasks, the number of partners, and asymmetries between agents are shown to increase the expected time to completion. The model may be applied to academic co-authorship, as...

A team must select among competing projects that differ in their payoff consequences for its members. Each agent chooses a project and exerts costly effort affecting its random completion time. When one or more projects are complete, agents bargain over which one to implement. A consensus...

We analyse strategic experimentation in which information arrives through fully revealing, publicly observable “breakdowns.” With hidden actions, there exists a unique equilibrium that involves randomization over stopping times. This randomization induces belief disagreement on the...