Do Autocratic States Trade Less?

Autocratic Legislatures and Expropriation Risk

An important question for international investors concerns the relationship between political institutions and property rights. Yet a debate remains over whether authoritarian institutions promote favorable investment climates. Using data on oil nationalization in a sample of autocracies, this study finds that legislatures are correlated with lower expropriation risk in non-personalist dictator...

Autocratic strategies for alternating games.

Repeated games have a long tradition in the behavioral sciences and evolutionary biology. Recently, strategies were discovered that permit an unprecedented level of control over repeated interactions by enabling a player to unilaterally enforce linear constraints on payoffs. Here, we extend this theory of "zero-determinant" (or, more generally, "autocratic") strategies to alternating games, whi...

EU Enlargement: The New Member States and Agricultural Trade Potentials

Why Do Investors Trade?

We propose and estimate a structural model of daily stock market activity to test competing theories of trading volume. The model features informed rational speculators and uninformed agents who trade either to hedge endowment shocks or to speculate on perceived information. To identify the model parameters, we exploit enormous empirical variation in trading volume, market liquidity, and return...

Autocratic Ghosts and Chinese Hunger

Continuing revelations about Joseph Stalin’s reign have led many historians to rank him the greatest mass murderer of our century and possibly of all time. But a growing body of evidence indicates that they are probably mistaken: Mao Zedong, the dictator of Communist China for nearly thirty years, appears to have outdone his Russian counterpart after only a dozen years in power. Two recent book...