Bureaucracies may set priorities for their workload according to social goals or the desires of concentrated private interests. This paper explores bureaucratic priorities empirically by studying Superfund, the federal program for cleaning up contaminated sites. It examines the amount of time...

Existing models of contagious currency crises are summarized and surveyed, and it is argued that more weight should be put on political factors. Towards this end, the concept of political contagion introduced, whereby contagion in speculative attacks across currencies arises solely because of...

During Britain's industrialization, Parliament operated a forum where rights to land and resources could be reorganized. This venue enabled landholders and communities to exploit economic opportunities that could not be accommodated by the inflexible rights regime inherited from the past. In...

We study the constrained Pareto efficient allocations in a dynamic production economy in which the group that holds political power decides the allocation of resources. We show that Pareto efficient allocations take a quasi-Markovian structure and can be represented recursively as a function of...

Political partisanship is strongly correlated with attitudes and behavior, but it is unclear from this pattern whether partisan identity has a causal effect on political behavior and attitudes. We report the results of a field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of party...

We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the Ramsey model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. We show that, as long as the discount factor of the politician is equal to or greater than...

Stringent regulation for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions will impose different costs across geographical regions. Low-carbon, environmentalist states, such as California, would bear less of the incidence of such regulation than high-carbon Midwestern states. Such anticipated costs are likely...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

We investigate the association between the timing of enrollment in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and smoking among prenatal WIC participants. We use WIC data from eight states participating in the Pregnancy Nutrition Surveillance System (PNSS)....

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to...