Interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker. If their interests are aligned with those of the policymaker's constituency, they have costless access and report their private information truthfully. If their interests conflict, they are forced...

Businesspeople sigh, Can’t the university be more like business. The faculty complain about business values crowding out academic values. The truth, I contend, lies in the muddy middle. In some respects the university is becoming more like business, and in other respects business is becoming...

Empirical studies of central bank independence and inflation identify Japan as an outlier. By standard measures, the Bank of Japan is one of the least independent central banks in the world, and yet Japan enjoys some of the lowest inflation rates. This paper develops a model of monetary link;...

In this article, the author extends the basic repeated prisoners' dilemma to allow for the linkage of punishment strategies across issues (issue linkage) as well as decentralized third-party enforcement (player linkage). The concepts of issue and player linkage are then synthesized to develop...

If different parties control the U.S. Congress and White House, the United States may maintain higher import protection than otherwise. This proposition follows from a distributive politics model in which Congress can choose to delegate trade policymaking to the President. When the congressional...

Information about various policy alternatives is dispersed among the individual members of a society. Prior to a vote over the alternatives, some people take costly political action to signal their private information to voters. By informing voting decisions, political action has potential to...

The Nordhaus hypothesis about the political business cycle asserts that elected politicians have incentives to expand the money supply prior to elections to stimulate the economy and thereby engineer their reelection. Central bank independence is widely regarded as an institutional solution to...