This paper considers an endogenous growth model with productive government spending in which overlapping generations of agents vote sequentially on policy. With sequential majority voting, there is a multiplicity of politico-economic equilibria originating from self-fulfilling policy expectations. Some of these equilibria are Pareto-inefficient and there are endogenous cycles. A constitutional ...

This paper identifies conditions under which voters are better off not knowing the policy choices of incumbents: we show that government transparency can actually lower voter welfare. To do so, we analyze a model of political agency where voters face two forms of uncertainty: uncertainty about the incumbent’s policy preferences and uncertainty about the relationship between policies and outcome...

This paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with endogenous information acquisition. It proves that majoritarian elections can fail to aggregate information when voters have heterogeneous skills. Informational inefficiencies can be partially corrected by improving the skills of the electors as the population increases, or by limiting participation to the most competent citiz...

This paper examines whether decentralization increases the responsiveness of public investment to local needs using a unique database from Bolivia. Empirical tests show that investment patterns in human capital and social services changed significantly after decentralization. These changes are strongly and positively related to objective indicators of need. Nationally, these changes were driven...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing designer of the contest prefers the sequential to the simultaneous setting from an ex ante perspective. Mo...

We introduce a general framework in which politicians choose a (possibly infinite) sequence of binary policies. The two competing candidates are exogenously committed to particular actions on a subset of these issues, while they can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Citizens have general preferences over policies, and the distribution of preferenc...

This paper models voters’ preferences over central versus local education policies when there are private alternatives. Education is financed by income taxes and individuals are mobile between communities. Public education levels are chosen by majority vote. Contrary to conventional wisdom, centralisation may benefit the rich and poor, while the middle class prefer decentralised education. The ...

Moore and Repullo [Subgame perfect implementation, Econometrica 56 (1988) 1191–1220], and Abreu and Sen [Subgame perfect implementation: a necessary and almost sufficient condition, J. Econ. Theory 50 (1990) 285–299] introduce distinct necessary and sufficient conditions for SPE implementation, when the number of players is at least three. This paper closes the gap between the conditions—a comp...

On the Escalation and De-Escalation of Conflict We introduce three variations of the Hirshleifer-Skaperdas conflict game to study experimentally the effects of post-conflict behavior and repeated interaction on the allocation of effort between production and appropriation. Without repeated interaction, destruction of resources by defeated players can lead to lower appropriative efforts and high...

We investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models. In a generalized costly voting model, we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large, then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient. Increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participat...