Economic Drivers of Populism

Regional Drivers of Economic Growth

The purpose of this report is to discuss the economic performance of the Richmond metropolitan area and to explore some of the drivers of regional growth. The Richmond metropolitan area is compared to a peer group of metropolitan areas of similar size based on population in 2010. In addition, a second exercise for benchmarking Richmond focused on other state capitals. Although this summary does...

Rise of populism

The True Drivers of Economic Development

A Political Theory of Populism

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...