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...

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...

Reputation concerns of politicians sometimes force them to implement biased policies. We study the effect of reputation (i.e., reelection) concerns on taxation in the age of globalization. To this end, we construct a two-country asymmetric tax competition model in which the residents in one of...