After decades of successful growth, economic unions have recently become the focus of heightened political controversy. To understand why, we develop a theoretical model of the effects on trade, income distribution and ...

Poor performance by the established political class can drive voters towards antiestablishment outsiders. Is the ineffectiveness of incumbent politicians an important driver of the recent rise of populist parties? We provide ...

Psychologists have long documented that we over-attribute people's actions to innate characteristics, rather than to luck or circumstances. Similarly, economists have found that both politicians and businessmen are rewarded ...

This paper develops a theoretical framework to study the interaction between globalization and political structure. We show that political structure adapts in a non-monotonic way to declining transport costs. Borders hamper ...

Protectionism enjoys surprising popular support, in spite of deadweight losses. At the same time, trade barriers appear to decline with public information about protection. This paper develops an electoral model with ...

Expensive infrastructure is ineffective if it doesn't travel the last mile. In nineteenth-century New York and modern Africa, disease has spread when urbanites chose not to use newly built sanitation infrastructure to save ...

Many real-world contracts contain vague clauses despite the enforcement risk they entail. To study the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, we build a principal agent model in which contracts can include vague clauses ...

This article explains why decentralization can undermine accountability and answers three questions: what determines if power should be centralized or decentralized when regions are heterogeneous? How many levels of ...

A central challenge in securing property rights is the subversion of justice. We present a model of a polluter whose discharges harm multiple owners, and we compare property rules, liability rules, and regulation on ...