According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The results show that severe sanctions almost perfectly deter free-riding. However, people also obey law ba...

This paper studies the electoral effects of town hall meetings based on programmatic, nonclientelist platforms. The experiment involves the cooperation of leading candidates in a presidential election in Benin. A campaign strategy based solely on these meetings was assigned to randomly selected villages and compared to the standard strategy of clientelist rallies. We !nd that treatment reduces ...

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected. The surge in imports was concentrated in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage, not...

We propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions. Good actions may be misperceived as bad and information about past actions is limited. Conflict spirals start as a result of misperceptions but al...

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that majority voting over a linear income tax schedule will result in an inefficiently high tax rate whenever the median voter has a below average income. The present paper examines the role of tax avoidance for this welfare assessment. We find that the inefficiency in the voting equilibrium is the lower, the higher the average level of...

We develop a model of interest group influence in the presence of repeated electoral competition. In each period of the game, an interest group attempts to “buy” an incumbent’s policy choice, and a voter chooses whether to replace the incumbent with an unknown challenger. The voter faces a tension between retaining good politician types and rewarding past performance. The model predicts that “a...

I study the strategic incentives to coordinate votes in an assembly. Coalitions form voting blocs, acting as single players and affecting the policy outcome. In an assembly with two exogenous parties I show how the incentives to accept party discipline depend on the types of the agents, the sizes of the parties, and the rules the blocs use to aggregate preferences. In a game of fully endogenous...

Following the present atmosphere of budgetary cuts we analyze the effects of fiscal consolidation on the composition of government expenditures by functions. Using a dynamic voter group decision model and exploiting the panel structure of the dataset – 26 OECD countries over the period 1970-1997by GMM estimation we find that fiscal adjustments protect social expenditure. Nevertheless, we find t...

Identifying the effects of political endorsements has historically been difficult. Before the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by talk show host Oprah Winfrey. In this article, we assess the impact of this endorsement using, as measures of Winfrey s influence, subscriptions to her magazine and sales of books she recommends. We find that her endorsement increased O...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset from China's initial reform of fiscal decentralization to analyze the relationships between fiscal decentralization, local economic development, and rural-rural undocumented inter-provincial labor mobility. Using a modified gravity model with Heckman Maximum Likelihood Estimation method, this paper shows that fiscal decentralization has two contending effe...