Governments have responded to misleading advertising by banning it, engaging in counter-advertising and taxing and regulating the product. In this paper, we consider the welfare effects of those different responses to misinformation. While misinformation lowers consumer surplus, its effect on...

Regulatory caps on contributions to political campaigns are the cornerstones of campaign finance legislation in many established democracies, and their introduction is considered by most emerging ones. Are these regulations desirable? This paper studies contribution caps in a menu auction...

We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill and gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms to modernize their technology and enter the export market. New technologies involve computerized production processes and lower...

Civil service rules governing the selection and motivation of bureaucrats are among the defining institutions of modern democracies. Although this is an active area of reform in the US and elsewhere, economic analyses of the issue are virtually nonexistent. This paper provides the first welfare...

Politicians can benefit by ensuring that public sector positions requiring political services are occupied by partisans. We study a model in which this political screening is achieved by varying the amount of required political services and associated compensation in otherwise similar positions....

This paper studies the policy impact of civil service regulations, exploiting reforms undertaken by US state governments throughout the 20th century. These reforms replaced political patronage with a civil service recruited based on merit and protected from politics. I find that state...

This paper studies the effect of trade liberalization on an under-explored aspect of wage inequality - gender inequality. We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill as well as gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms...

This paper studies the effect of trade liberalization on an under-explored aspect of wage inequality - gender inequality. We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill as well as gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms...