In this article, the authors develop a political market framework to explain the circumstances under which Florida counties will supply environmental public goods in the form of conservation amendments to county general plans. The framework emphasizes the role of local legislative and executive institutions as mediators of local policy change. Using count models and interaction terms, the analy...

This dissertation consists of three chapters on the interaction of political institutions and macroeconomic activity in dynamic environments. Chapter 1 studies the optimal management of taxes and debt in a framework which relaxes the standard assumption of a benevolent government. We assume instead the existence of a self-interested ruler who manages the government budget. Unlike in the standar...

When are political institutions stable? When do they tend toward reform? This paper examines a model of dynamic, endogenous institutional change. I introduce a class of dynamic political games in which the political aggregation rules used at date t+1 are instrumental choices under rules at date t. A political rule is stable if it selects itself. A reform occurs when an alternative rule is selec...

The most recent generation of currency and nancial crisis literature blames the borrowing decisions of real and nancial sector actors; in particular, it argues that the de facto dollarization of liabilities is inherently risky and can trigger a host of economic ills that impede economic development. This paper presents and tests an institutional theory of de facto nancial dollarization. It argu...

Abstract Can revenue sharing of resource rents be a source distributive conflict? cohesive institutions avoid such conflicts? We exploit exogenous variation in local government revenues and new data on democratic Nigeria to study these questions. find strong link between conflict. Conflicts are highly organized concentrated districts time-periods with unelected governments. Once governments ele...

This paper focuses on mass media’s impact on citizens’ confidence in political institutions. Drawing on research within the field of political science that builds on the discrepancy theory from cognitive psychology, the paper argues that citizens’ preferences of how political institutions should work and the outcomes they should produce moderate mass media’s impact. Building on research of medi...