The importance of primary elections is considered within the context of U.S. Senate elections where senators serve overlapping terms and voters are assumed to balance their two senators against each other. Voters behave strategically in the primaries but convergence to the median position is not...

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...

Economic freedom indicators have become quite popular recently as a useful tool to quantify the relationship between a country's institutions and its prosperity. In a recent article, Hanson (2003) criticizes these types of studies for: (i) failing to adequately distinguish between different...

In the quarter century since the publication of Mancur Olson's Rise and Decline of Nations, a large literature has evolved testing the central hypothesis regarding Olson's thesis on institutional sclerosis. These tests have taken the form of both econometric regression analysis involving a...

The theory of opportunistic political business cycles predicts incumbent politicians will alter their economic policies to spur short-run growth to attract additional votes for the upcoming election. There has not been much emphasis on the possibility of historical political business cycles...

The Variable Rational Partisan Business Cycle model is developed, where agents face uncertainty regarding the timing and outcome of the next election. The model predicts that partisan influences on the economy persist throughout the government's rule and are further influenced, in the opposite...