There is a long-standing difference amongst public economists between those who think that collective choice must be formally acknowledged, and those who derive their policy recommendations from a social planning framework in which politics plays no role. The purpose of this book is to...

This article provides a general theory explaining the geographic and population size and wealth of nations. Successful countries create conditions for high productivity in the economic sphere by enforcing property rights and providing social overhead capital and at the same time minimize...

This article discusses the necessary conditions for two countries at war to come to a settlement and explores how domestic and military costs, time preferences and attitudes toward risk affect the timing and the outcome of the peace. It views the termination of war as a process of rational...

Religions are organized in a variety of ways. They may resemble an elected autocracy, aparliamentary democracy, or something akin to a monarchy, where heredity plays aprimary role. This variation allows for a comparative study of their organization.These differing power arrangements call for...

This paper shows how uninformed but rational voters can respond intelligently to political advertising. The paper models a situation where a candidate must rely on a pressure group for financing political advertising. The pressure group uses its power over the purse to influence the position...

We show that status-quo bias combined with downward-sloping demand implies addictive behavior. This result does not depend on transitivity, a complete ordering, or even the existence of a preference relation that rationalizes choices.

We demonstrate the existence of an electoral equilibrium in a model with three or more candidates. We use the same kinds of assumptions that have previously been used to establish existence in two-candidate models and have not had to make special assumptions regarding dimensionality (e.g., that...