To explore the propagation of undesirable policies in a form of populist extremism, we construct a social learning model featuring agency problems. Politicians in different countries sequentially implement a policy. Voters learn the incumbent politician's type and the desirable policy by...

Labor immobility (high adjustment cost) has been regarded as a major obstacle to trade liberalization, and it has been argued that higher labor mobility promotes trade liberalization. However, this is not the case when we take into account conflicts of interests between politicians and voters...

There often exists a supermajority rule that enables the minority party to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. I construct a two-period model consisting of a representative voter, self-interested parties, and a media outlet. In the model, the majority party has an incentive to misrepresent the...

Expectation formation about future trade liberalization induces sectoral adjustment in advance and so the number of opposition decreases and trade liberalization can be self-fulfilling. We analyze this expectation formation mechanism in political process from two aspects: population aging and...

We construct a model in which an incumbent and a challenger decide whether to focus on policy or ability in electoral campaigning, and a media outlet then decides whether to gather news. We show that a candidate's strategy on which issue to focus on (i.e., campaign messages) can be a signal...