The literature on political economy has over the years divided into two reasonably distinct areas of concern: international and comparative political economy. International political economy tends to concern itself with global trends—in terms of global flows of investment and trade—and with global actors and industries—including multinational corporations, international regulatory regimes and b...

How does politics affect economic outcomes? This question has been asked probably as long as people have been interested in economics itself. Ž From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 or perhaps the Physiocrats . even earlier until at least John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy in 1848, what we now call ‘‘economics’’ was in fact generally referred to as ‘‘political economy.’’ T...

This paper develops a model where short-term reputation concerns guide the public disclosure of information and affect welfare in a coordination environment. Entrepreneurs use public information to make investment decisions, and there is complementarity in their actions. There are and high and low states that determine the productivity in the economy, and the high state is more likely if the go...

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...

As agricultural products move from being economic commodities to quality-differentiated goods, price dispersion within specific markets increases and implicit subsidies from high quality producers to low quality producers are removed. This paper examines how these distributional effects can influence patterns of support and opposition to changes in marketing arrangements. The simple model devel...

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...

The line of scholarship dominating Anglophone geographers’ approaches to studying economic geography since 1980 can be characterized as geographical political economy; an approach prioritizing commodity production over market exchange. Here the spatialities of capitalism co-evolve with its economic processes and economic, political, cultural and biophysical processes are co-implicated with one ...

It is a great honour to give this year’s Keynes lecture. I have chosen as my subject the New Political Economy, a body of research and thinking that has ‡ourished in the past …fteen years or so at the interface between economics and politics. At the margin the New Political Economy reverses the split that occurred between the disciplines of economics and political science at the end of the nine...

Taking the view that constitutions are devices Whereby people coordinate to specific equilibria in circumstances that allow multiple equilibria, we show that a constitutional secession clause can serve as such a device and, therefore, that such a clause is more than an empty promise or an ineffectual threat. Employing a simple three-person recursive game, we establish that under certain conditi...

is paper uses a formal electoral model as the basis for discussion of various political episodes in British and US history and to evaluate the logic of Madison’s argument about the republican scheme of government. is leads to the inference that political choice involves electoral judgment as well as preference. e stochastic electoral model is extended to incorporate the basis of judgment, namel...