This paper considers the implications of an important cognitive bias in information processing, confirmation bias, in a political agency setting. In the baseline two-period case where only the politician's actions are observable before the election, we show that when voters have this bias, it...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamics of electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. The interplay between the median voter’s reference point and political parties’ choice of platforms generates a dynamic...

Patent boxes have been heavily debated for their role in corporate tax competition. This paper uses firm-level data for the period 2000-2011 for the top 2,000 corporate research and development (R&D) investors worldwide to consider the determinants of patent registration across a large sample of...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamicsof electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters' reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of...

In this paper we abstract from the usual gains and costs of decentralization (e.g. preference matching, spillovers and economies of scale). Instead we compare the political accountability of decentralized governments relative to centralized ones when there is a risk of bad governance. We study...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamicsof electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters' reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of...