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 ...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard’s median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. Th...

background national/social health insurance schemes have increasingly been seen in many low- and middle-income countries (lmics) as a vehicle to universal health coverage (uhc) and a viable alternative funding mechanism for the health sector. several countries, including ghana, have thus introduced and implemented mandatory national health insurance schemes (nhis) as part of reform efforts towa...

We study an open economy where a pro labor and a pro business candidate compete in an election. The winner chooses taxes, which affect investment returns. Electoral outcomes depend on the size of the foreign debt, but the debt itself reflects expectations about the election. The resulting interaction is novel and has several implications. Elections are associated with increased volatility. Poli...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of intergenerational contracts, whose driving force is the intergenerational conflict over government spending. Embedding a repeated probabilistic voting setup in a standard OLG model with human capital accumulation, we find that the empowerment of elderly constituencies is key in order to enforce productive policies. The paper characterize...

This paper presents a theory of reasoning and argument comprehension currently implemented in OpEd, a computer system that reads short politico-economic editorials and answers questions about the editorial contents. We believe that all arguments are composed of a fixed number of abstract argument structures, which we call Argument Units (AUs). Thus, argument comprehension is viewed in OpEd fund...