We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or control. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions or turnout in po...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple NEG model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the most productivity firms; this implies interesting results for empirical work and policy analysis. A ‘selection effect’ mean...

Liberal economists have developed a framework of good governance as market-enhancing governance, focusing on governance capabilities that reduce transaction costs and enable markets to work more efficiently. In contrast, heterodox economists have stressed the role of growth-enhancing governance, which focuses on governance capacities to overcome entrenched market failures in allocating assets, ...

Post-Soviet African democratization has introduced elections into contexts that often lack restraints upon the behavior of candidates, resulting in the emergence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot fraud. We propose a model of electoral competition where, although some voters oppose violence, it is effective in intimidating swing voters. We show that in equilibrium a weak challenger ...

this paper examines the impact of 2005 presidential election of iran on the tehran stock exchange volatility as a political shock. it uses garch family (fiegarch, egarch, and garch) and markov regime switching (mrs) models as the analytical frameworks for the main the stock daily prices index. our findings confirm statistical validity of arima – fiegarch-x and ar(1) mrs as appropriate specifica...

background: cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (cin) is a premalignant lesion capable of progressing to cervical cancer. despite the existing well-defined criteria, the histomorphologic diagnosis is subject to high rates of discordance among pathologists. the aim of this study was to evaluate ki-67 (mib-1), ck17 and p16 ink4a (p16) markers by immunohistochemical methods in differentiating cin f...

We study elections in which two candidates poll voters about their preferred policies before taking policy positions. In the essentially unique equilibrium, candidates who receive moderate signals adopt more extreme platforms than their information suggests, but candidates with more extreme signals may moderate their platforms. Policy convergence does not maximize voters’ welfare. Although cand...

A class of voting procedures based on repeated ballots and elimination of one candidate in each round is shown to always induce an outcome in the top cycle and is thus Condorcet consistent, when voters behave strategically. This is an important class as it covers multi-stage, sequential elimination extensions of all standard one-shot voting rules (with the exception of negative voting), the sam...

We analyze positive theories of redistribution, social insurance and public good provision in a dynamic macroeconomic framework. Political outcomes are determined via repeated voting and driven by a conflict of interests between agents. Voters and politicians rationally forecast the impact of current political choices on future political and economic outcomes. The theory is consistent with larg...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a...