The Expansion of Higher Education and Time-Consistent Taxation This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a result of increasing own income, the ...

Several explanations have been proposed for why voters continue to support unfunded social security systems. Browning (1975) suggests that the extremely large unfunded pension systems of most democracies depend on the existence of a voting majority composed of middle-aged and older people who fail to fully internalize the cost of financing the system. In fact, when voting, economically rational...

Economists have long recognized that regulation is an imperfect solution to market failure. Do the inefficiencies of regulation outweigh the inefficiencies of market failure? In this paper, we develop a stylized model of a monopolist offering two services, one more widely demanded than the other. We compare aggregate surplus from unregulated monopoly with aggregate surplus from a median voter m...

Condorcet domains are sets of linear orders with the property that, whenever the preferences of all voters belong to this set, the majority relation has no cycles. We observe that, without loss of generality, such domain can be assumed to be closed in the sense that it contains the majority relation of every profile with an odd number of individuals whose preferences belong to this domain. We s...

This chapter tests several prediction of the Gerrymandering model simulation with respect to the effect of redistricting institutions on four different measures of voter welfare. Empirical voter utility is estimated by generating ideology scores for respondents to the 2008 CCES survey on a common scale with members of the 110 Congress, and then rescaling these estimates to match DW-NOMINATE. Th...

Democratic states tend to raise large shares of national income through taxes, and spend the money in ways which redistribute resources from higher lower groups. This connection between democratic politics taxes is a commonplace political economy scholarship, but there much less clarity about mechanisms this redistribution occurs, reasons for variations degree objectives social justice are achi...

In this paper we analyze a two-candidate electoral competition in which a candidate can either lie about his private policy preference in order to get elected, or pander to post-election external influences in choosing a policy to implement. Both the pre-election announcement and post-election implementation are a candidate’s strategic choices. We show that, in equilibrium, different types of c...