How do people choose what economic advice to heed? We develop a set of validated multiple-choice questions on economic policy problems, to examine empirically the persuasiveness of expert versus populist advice. We define populism as advice that conforms to commonly held beliefs, even when...

In this paper we present a political economy approach in order to explain the degree of financial openness for an economy. In the model, entrepreneurs, who may have efficient or inefficient projects, vote for policies, which are proposed by selfish politicians. Two political frictions...

This paper presents a model of political competition, where voter decisions are affected by their ideological adherence to political parties. We derive a number of interesting results: First, we show that an equilibrium exists even though voting is fully deterministic. Second, corruption and...

We relate the design of contract law to the process of development. Contract law defines which private agreements are enforceable and which are not. Specifically, we consider an economy where agents face a hold-up problem. The resulting time-inconsistency problem leads to inefficiently low...

We examine the two-candidate equilibria of the citizen-candidate model when the implemented policy arises from a compromise between the government and an unelected external power. We show that the equilibria of this model differ significantly from the original: the distance between the...