This paper argues for the central role of risk aversion in shaping political ideology. We develop a political economy model, which makes explicit the link between risk aversion, the labor market, government policy, and ideology. Our model distinguishes the effects of risk aversion from...

We develop a dynamic two-party political economy framework, in which parties seek to maximize vote share and face the trade-off between catering to their respective core constituencies on the one hand and "middle of the road" voters with no partisan affiliation on the other hand. In contrast to...

There exists a long-standing debate about the influence of ideology in economics. Surprisingly, however, there is no concrete empirical evidence to examine this critical issue. Using an online randomized controlled experiment involving 2425 economists in 19 countries, we examine the effect of...

Why do groups of even well-educated individuals sometimes persistently believe in political myths and ideologies? We follow cognition psychology in its finding that individuals sometimes stick with intuitive but false propositions. We also follow Kahneman, however, in maintaining that they...