We construct a measure of gubernatorial candidates’ personal appeal by showing 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asking them to predict the election outcomes. The participants’ predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their imp...

Information may be transmitted directly from a sender to a receiver, or indirectly through intermediaries. How do intermediaries affect the reporting truthfulness of an informed sender? When does he prefer using intermediaries? In this model, an objective sender or intermediary passes on information truthfully, while a biased one wants to push a particular agenda but also has reputational conce...

We look at the consequences of allowing public health insurance (PuHI) to be voluntary when its coverage can be supplemented in the market. PuHI redistributes with respect to risk and income, and the market is affected by adverse selection. We argue that making PuHI voluntary does not lead to its collapse since there are always individuals participating in it. Additionally, in some cases, a vol...

I analyze how boards of directors with heterogeneous preferences can affect the information shared with the CEO with the help of a cheap-talk model that allows for large groups of receivers. This paper provides new insights on how heterogeneity of boards can change the way of communication between the board and the CEO, related to different ways of decision making. My model gives some insights ...

How do governors’ reelection motives affect policy experimentation? We develop a theoretical model of this situation, and then test the predictions in data on US state-level welfare reforms from 1978 to 2007. This period marked most dramatic shift social since New Deal. Our findings indicate that governors with strong electoral support are less likely experiment than little support. Yet, who ca...

This paper presents a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model that can explain cross-country empirical regularities in geographical mobility, unemployment and labor market institutions. Rational agents vote over unemployment insurance (UI), taking the dynamic distortionary effects of insurance on the performance of the labor market into consideration. Agents with higher cost of moving, i.e....

Electoral Goals and Center-State Transfers: A Theoretical Model and Empirical Evidence from India We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels...

This paper studies the optimal contest design problem when the abilities of the risk neutral contestants are independent private information. The contest designer has a fixed prize budget to elicit efforts from the contestants. We consider all possible mechanisms that allocate prizes and punishments (negative prizes) across the contestants. We find that an optimal contest mechanism does not exi...

One assumption in the Shapley–Shubik power index is that there is no interaction nor influence among the voting members. This paper will apply the command structure of Shapley (1994) to model members’ interaction relations by simple games. An equilibrium authority distribution is then formulated by the power-in/power-out mechanism. It turns out to have much similarity to the invariant measure o...