This paper argues that uncertain or random voter turnout plays a key role in mediating conflicts of interest between voters and politicians on the one hand and heterogenous groups of voters on the other. Random voter turnout creates an incentive for politicians to seek con- sensus because it is...

We study the e¢ cient allocation of spending and taxation authority in a federation in which federal politicians are exposed to electoral uncertainty. We show that centralization may, but need not, result in a loss of electoral accountability. We identify an important asymmetry between positive...

This paper examines the effects of firm-level innovation in carbonabatement technologies on optimal cap-and-trade schemes with and without price controls. We characterize optimal cap-and-trade regulation with a price cap and price floor, and compare it to the individual cases of pure taxation...

Many industrialised countries have experienced an increase in environmental awareness and support to green lobby groups in past decades. This paper develops a political-economy model to investigate to what extent a rise of environmentalism, via the induced change in political power structures,...

This paper uses the complexity of non-competitive behaviour to provide a new justification for competitive equilibrium in the context of extensive-form market games with a finite number of agents. This paper demonstrates that if rational agents have (at least at the margin) an aversion for...

This paper examines repeated implementation of a social choice function (SCF) with infinitely-lived agents whose preferences are determined randomly in each period. An SCF is repeated-implementable in (Bayesian) Nash equilibrium if there exists a sequence of (possibly history-dependent)...

This paper studies the relationship between corruption and sustainable development in a sample of 110 countries between 1996 and 2007. Sustainability is measured by growth in genuine wealth per capita. The empirical analysis consistently finds that cross-national measures of perceived and...

This paper presents an argument in favor of foreign lobbying. We show how foreign lobbying can help internalize cross national externalities and promote social objectives.

Most of the voting models restrict themselves to the analysis of symmetric equilibria, i.e. equilibria in which ‘similar’ voters make ‘similar’ voting decisions. In this paper we investigate this assumption under costly plurality voting. In any pure strategy equilibrium, if two active...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may dier in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...