State and Development: The Need for a Reappraisal of the Current Literature

By Pranab Bardhan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

This essay tries to bring out some of the complexities that are overlooked in the usual treatment of the state in the institutional economics literature and supplement the latter with a discussion of some alternative approaches to looking at the possible ...

Review of Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences by Carles Boix

By Alberto Alesina

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences argues that geography, technology, and wars determined the formation of a ruling class, inequality, and institutional development, rather than the other way around. Institutio...

Habit Formation in Voting: Evidence from Rainy Elections

By Thomas Fujiwara, Kyle Meng, and Tom Vogl

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

We estimate habit formation in voting--the effect of past on current turnout--by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on US presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that rainfall on current and past election days reduces...

The Agricultural Origins of Time Preference

By Oded Galor and Ömer Özak

American Economic Review, October 2016

This research explores the origins of observed differences in time preference across countries and regions. Exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of suitable crops for cultivation in the course of the Columbian Exchange, the resear...

Delegating Multiple Decisions

By Alex Frankel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

This paper shows how to extend the heuristic of capping an agent against her bias to delegation problems over multiple decisions. Caps may be exactly optimal when the agent has constant biases, in which case a cap corresponds to a ceiling on the weighted ...

Voluntary Contributions and Collective Redistribution

By Andrzej Baranski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2016

I study a multilateral bargaining game in which committee members invest in a common project prior to redistributing the total value of production. The game corresponds to a Baron and Ferejohn (1989) legislative bargaining model preceded by a production s...

Persuading Voters

By Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

American Economic Review, November 2016

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 nonunanimous voting rule, she exp...

Political Economy of Redistribution in the United States in the Aftermath of World War II--Evidence and Theory

By Roel Beetsma, Alex Cukierman, and Massimo Giuliodori

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2016

We present legislative, historical and statistical evidence of a substantial upward ratchet in transfers and taxes in the US due to World War II. This finding is explained within a political-economy framework with defense spending responding to a war thre...