Throughout his career, Thrainn Eggertsson has been concerned with improving economic theory as a way to help us to understand the economic world. This has led him to focus on the problem of knowledge, which Eggertsson believes hinders the improvement of theory. This essay attempts to contribute...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the party incumbency advantage in mayoral elections in Germany. Using a regression discontinuity design on a data set of about 25,000 elections, I estimate a causal incumbency effect of 38-40 percentage points in the probability of winning the next mayor...

Two origins of the Voting Rights Act are familiar to us. Most prominent is the March 1965 assault of Alabama state troopers and Dallas County, Alabama deputy sheriffs and their posse on civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The Supreme Court tells a slightly...

Many scholars argue that "retrospective voting" is a powerful information shortcut that offsets widespread voter ignorance. Even relatively ignorant voters, it is claimed, can punish incumbents for bad performance and reward them if things go well. But if voters' understanding of which officials...

We analyze how (anticipated) changes in the competitiveness of the seats of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers. The competitiveness of the seats changes because the merger changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in...

This paper studies voters' preferences on municipal borders in a setting with cohabiting linguistic communities. It takes advantage of unique data from referendum results in the Canadian province of Quebec in 2004, which allows a direct investigation of voter preferences. I find that differences...

Can abundance of natural resources affect legislators' voting behavior over federal tax policies? We construct a political economy model of a federalized economy with district heterogeneity in natural resource abundance. The model shows that representatives of natural resource rich districts are...

Fiscal decentralization is high on the agenda in policy fora. This paper empirically investigates the underlying causes of fiscal decentralization, based on the predictions of a simple political economy model. We argue that the likeliness that a central government engages in devolution of powers...

This paper explores the interdependency of political institutions from the voter's perspective. Specifically, we are interested in three questions: (1) Does the partisan identity of the local mayor influence the voter's decision in the subsequent town council election?; (2) Does this partisan...

This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial decentralization. The analysis is based on an agency model, in which two levels of government are involved in the provision of a...