We investigate competition between experts with different motives. A policy-maker has to implement a policy and can either acquire information herself or hire a biased but well-informed expert. We show that the expert charges a fee if interests between the agents are roughly aligned, and pays...

We critically discuss the Jefferson/D'Hondt and Webster/Sainte-Laguë methods, which are used to allocate parliament seats to parties in the mixed-member proportional representation systems in Germany, New Zealand, Bolivia, South Africa, South Korea, Scotland and Wales, as well as in the...

This research investigates the intricate relationship between government spending and election outcomes in Zamboanga Peninsula (Region IX), Philippines, with a particular focus on the pervasive phenomenon of pork barrel politics. Employing a rigorous empirical approach, this paper analyzes...

The expression "cash-for-votes" describes a form of vote buying in which candidates for office pay individuals in exchange for their votes. That practice undermines the functioning of democracy but is pervasive in many parts of the world, especially in the Global South. We discuss estimates of...

This paper studies the effect of partisan politics on stock returns in the U.S. by exploring different measures of corporate taxes. The results support the partisan politics cycle effect on equity returns. The cross-sectional analysis shows that the measures of corporate taxes impact stock...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamics of electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. The interplay between the median voter’s reference point and political parties’ choice of platforms generates a dynamic...

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in...

In this paper we study the effect of electoral competition on corruption. Our theory shows that when electoral uncertainty is high, as is expected in many developing countries, there is a U-shaped relationship between electoral competition and corruption. We illustrate the predictions of the...

We propose six axioms concerning when one candidate should defeat another in a democratic election involving two or more candidates. Five of the axioms are widely satisfied by known voting procedures. The sixth axiom is a weakening of Kenneth Arrow’s famous condition of the Independence of...

Some societies appear to be better equipped than others to implement efficiency enhancing policy reforms and to deliver positive results out of their implementation. Our model presents an under-examined element of policy reform and institutional quality, showing how the characteristics of the...

I investigate the effect of different measures of corporate taxes on stock returns. The results support the partisan politics cycle effect on equity returns. A high minus low (Hi-Lo) portfolio sorted by (Total Corporate Taxes/Total Assets) has an annual return of +3.8% during Republican...

We assess the capacity of gerrymandering to undermine the will of the people in a representative democracy. Citizens have political positions represented on a spectrum, and electoral maps separate people into districts. We show that unrestrained gerrymandering can severely distort the...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamicsof electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters' reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of...

We estimate the effects of one of the largest anti-vote-buying campaigns ever studied — with half a million voters exposed across 1427 villages—in Uganda’s 2016 elections. Working with civil society organizations, we designed the study to estimate how voters and candidates responded to...

This paper examines the role of local TV market structure in US congressional politics, exploiting variation in the overlaps of political markets and TV markets. Local TV stations are hypothesized to report relatively more per US House representative in less populous markets (where the number of...

Does party polarization affect the electoral prospects of a new centrist candidate? The paper investigates this question in the context of a laboratory experiment where a centrist candidate is added to the race, between a left candidate and a right candidate. The experimental design varies the...

The prelude of the 2020 election is marred by dark projections of large-scale violence that could disrupt voting or a prolonged count of mail-in ballots requested due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Academics agree that this situation is unlikely to be an isolated occurrence. Rather, extreme...

I study the effect of partisan politics on stock returns in Latin America. There is a negative market reaction when left-wing parties win presidential elections. However, the observed democratic premium in the U.S. is not observed. Firms have higher returns when the president is from a Centrist...

This is the first out of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections by the methods of the mathematical theory of democracy. This one estimates the policy representation ability of the 39 parties that...

This is the second out of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. This paper arranges the contesting parties into a 'spectrum' that reflects the spatial proximity of their policy profiles. The latter are...

This is the third of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. Currently, only China has a parliament larger than the German Bundestag, which still grows due to the increasing number of overhang mandates. The...

This is the last of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our analysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. It is shown that the policy representation by the Bundestag could be improved using the alternative Third Vote election method. Under the Third...

This paper extends an intergenerational context to the prospect of upward mobility hypothesis, showing that the poor majority in democracies may not support massive redistribution for the sake of their children’s educational attainment and upward mobility. We develop an overlapping generations...

Using hand-collected data on political contributions from undisclosed sources, we document novel stylized facts on "dark money" and its role in elections and politician type. Over the past decade, dark money has become a major source of campaign financing and currently comprises the largest...

This paper studies the mechanisms behind party polarization in the US Congress. The model generates a link between the initial composition of the parties, the behavior of new interest groups and the pattern and level of polarization along the new policy dimension (e.g., environment). Our...

In developing countries with weak enforcement institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on electoral incentives to reduce corruption. In this paper we study the effect of electoral competition on corruption when uncertainty in elections is high, as in many developing countries. Our...

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in...

The worldwide wave of autocratization is doing away with many of the democratic achievements made since 1989. Scholarship on international democracy promotion is yet to theorise how democracy can be protected from autocratization. Such a theory must account for different democratic and...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamicsof electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters' reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of...

Polarization is a totalizing political tool. While the us versus them division has long fueled political competition, polarization is taking systemic struggle to the next level. Polarization divides the political landscape into two camps, where a compromise can only be found within a given...

The essay explains how ranked-choice voting leads to election outcomes that better represent what voters want compared with first-past-the-post, the traditional American voting system. It also shows that there is an even better system: majority-rule

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where ideologically motivated citizen groups form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties' seat shares, the size of...