This paper shows that government anti-smoking campaign can benefit the government in the political bargaining with the tobacco industry by reducing the latter's alternative welfare. Although the equilibrium regulation on the tobacco industry increases as a result of government anti-smoking campaign, the political contribution from the tobacco industry will not necessarily go down. Anti-smoking ...

The number of Internet news media outlets has grown rapidly in recent years. This paper analyzes the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes and social welfare. We assume voters are information-seeking but choose outlets that are excessively partisan given the voters’ own ideological preferences, due to quasi-rationality. We find that if voters who think (correctly or not) that the...

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. While finding successful manipulations or agenda controls is tractable for both procedures, our real-world experimental results indicate that most elections cannot be manipulated by a few voters and agenda control is typically impossible. If the voter preference...

Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters’ ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holdin...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

The literature on the electronic mail game shows that players’ mutual expectations may lock them into requiring an inefficiently large number of confirmations and confirmations of confirmations from one another. This paper shows that this result hinges on the assumption that, with the exception of the first message, each player can only send a message when receiving an immediately preceding mes...

We study the effect of financial disclosure on the selection of politicians, exploiting the staggering of Indian state assembly elections to identify the effect of disclosure laws. We document a 13 percentage point increase in exit of winning candidates post-disclosure, indicating that disclosure has a large effect on politician self-selection. This selection coincides with higher probability o...

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters’ choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician’s optimal experiment. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple...

Government ownership of banks is very common in countries other than the United States. This paper provides cross-country, bank-level empirical evidence about political influences on these banks. It shows that government-owned banks increase their lending in election years relative to private banks. This effect is robust to controlling for country-specific macroeconomic and institutional factor...

The privatization process in Eastern Europe is not irreversible. Future governments may want to (partially) expropriate successul private rms in order to subsidize unsuccessful ones. We use a simple median voter model to predict the policy of future governments. It is shown that there will be less expropriation the more shares were distributed for free to the population. Diversi ed mass privati...