The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture

Essays on Political Economy

This collection of essays investigates issues related to elections and wars. In the first essay, we present an auction-type model of war and characterize its unique equilibrium. We offer three different explanations for the causes of wars. First, as an individual-level explanation of war, we show that wars occur due to information asymmetry between governments. Second, as a societal-level expla...

Essays on Political Economy

This essay develops a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. Ideal policies of the different socioeconomic groups in society (landlords, industrialists, labor and skilled workers) are explicitly derived from a small open economy model. Then those ideal policies (trade policy and local public goods) are used to model t...

Essays in Political Accountability

This thesis is composed by three independent essays on the limits of political accountability. In the first essay I analyze an extremely stylized model of political agency with two dimensional outcomes. I show that the non-contractible nature of rewards to the agent (the politician) is especially taxing when the voters want to control outcomes in more than one dimension. I compare and contrast ...

Essays on Political Institutions and Macroeconomics

This dissertation consists of three chapters on the interaction of political institutions and macroeconomic activity in dynamic environments. Chapter 1 studies the optimal management of taxes and debt in a framework which relaxes the standard assumption of a benevolent government. We assume instead the existence of a self-interested ruler who manages the government budget. Unlike in the standar...

The Poverty of Political Culture