Investment in human capital accumulation, government consumption and total government expenditures present a striking negative correlation with capital shares. This correlation is robust to alternative speci...cations, lists of controls, and exclusion of outliers. Causality tests strongly support the hypothesis that the direction of causation runs from capital shares to the government spending ...

Investment in human capital accumulation, government consumption and total government expenditures present a striking negative correlation with capital shares. This correlation is robust to alternative speci...cations, lists of controls, and exclusion of outliers. Causality tests strongly support the hypothesis that the direction of causation runs from capital shares to the government spending ...

Based on the observation that industries are often geographically concentrated, this paper proposes a new political economy model of trade protection. We associate the sectors of a specific factors model with electoral districts populated by continua of heterogeneous voters who differ in their relative factor endowments. We show how strategic delegation leads each district to elect a representa...

This article tests the subset of public choice models for social security that have empirical implications. The data, collected from OECD countries for the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990, provide some support for each of the theories. Higher median voter age, more income heterogeneity, greater similarity in family size, and variables that make a public pension program more profitable are all ...

This article shows how uninformed but rational voters can respond intelligently to political advertising. The article models a situation where a candidate must rely on a pressure group for financing political advertising and making endorsements. The pressure group uses its power over the purse to influence the position chosen by the candidate. Nevertheless, when uninformed voters use a strategi...

We consider the standard mechanism design environment with linear utility but without monetary transfers. We establish an equivalence between deterministic, dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes, and we use this equivalence to characterize the constrained-efficient optimal mechanism for an utilitarian planner. ∗Gershkov: Department of Economics, ...

Social choice models usually assume that choice is among exogenously given and non decomposable alternatives. Often, on the contrary, choice is among objects that are constructed by individuals or institutions as complex bundles made of many interdependent components. In this paper we present a model of object construction in majority voting and show that, in general, by appropriate changes of ...

This paper characterizes a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections with a continuous policy space, where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a nonpolicy advantage over the other candidate. We assume that voters have quadratic preferences over policies and that their ideal points are drawn from a uniform distribution ove...

The privatization process in Eastern Europe is not irreversible. Future governments may want to (partially) expropriate successul private rms in order to subsidize unsuccessful ones. We use a simple median voter model to predict the policy of future governments. It is shown that there will be less expropriation the more shares were distributed for free to the population. Diversi ed mass privati...

The paper examines two issues associated with aid and fiscal policy. First, how best the conditionality behind foreign aid, sometimes non-economic, is complied with in a principal-agent framework. In a multiple task and multiple principal framework, principals are better off cooperating and making the agent’s efforts more complementary. Secondly, I examine endogenous policy formation in the con...