The secret ballot was designed to eliminate the incentive for candidates to purchase votes through direct vote buying. When voters have private information on their candidate preferences, incumbent candidates will generally be less efficient in purchasing votes than their challengers. Incumbent...

Assuming strict two-party competition, policy balancing models of the US senate imply that senators from the same state will often be from opposite parties and have great ideological divergence. We analyze the effect of independent candidates on these implications. Our theoretical model implies...

We apply the economic theory of crime to the National Hockey League. We analyze a natural experiment in which games during the 1999--2000 season had either one or two referees. We determine the effect of the number of referees on both the number of penalties called and the number of rules...

According to World Bank policy, countries remain eligible to borrow from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development until they are able to sustain long-term development without further recourse to Bank financing. Graduation from the Bank is not an automatic consequence of reaching...