We perform convergence tests on the U.S. states for per capita income from 1930 to 2009. Crosssectional tests support overall convergence and convergence but may not hold true for the last three decades. Time series tests suggest that about half of the states exhibit stochastic convergence and...

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...

Charles Beard ([1913] 2004) argued that the U.S. Constitution was created to advance the interests of people who owned personalty, particularly those at the Constitutional Convention. Because delegate votes on individual clauses at the Constitutional Convention were not publicly recorded, prior...

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...

This Handbook provides an overview of interdisciplinary research related to social choice and voting for a non-specialist audience. Expert contributors from various fields present critical interpretations of the existing literature and descriptions of famous theorems and other important results,...