相关论文: Universalization and the Origins of Fiscal Capacit…

This paper develops a political-economy theory of statehood without capacity. I argue that under specific institutional and geopolitical conditions, a polity can become trapped in an equilibrium of nominal statehood: a state in which claims…

We present an equilibrium model of politics in which political platforms compete over public opinion. A platform consists of a policy, a coalition of social groups with diverse intrinsic attitudes to policies, and a narrative. We…

In most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state-building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity.…

Many mechanisms behind the evolution of cooperation, such as reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and altruistic punishment, require group knowledge of individual actions. But what keeps people cooperating when no one is looking? Conformist…

We investigate the dynamics of wealth inequality in an economy where households have positional preferences, with the strength of the positional concern determined endogenously by inequality of wealth distribution in the society. We…

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges,…

Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…

At the zero lower bound, the New Keynesian model predicts that output and inflation collapse to implausibly low levels, and that government spending and forward guidance have implausibly large effects. To resolve these anomalies, we…

Rationality is frequently associated with making the best possible decisions. It's widely acknowledged that humans, as rational beings, have limitations in their decision-making capabilities. Nevertheless, recent advancements in fields,…

We study optimal taxation when citizens are not fully confident that the government will transform tax revenue into useful public goods. In an otherwise standard Ramsey framework, a representative agent values a public good financed by…

The so called "globalization" process (i.e. the inexorable integration of markets, currencies, nation-states, technologies and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole) has a behavior exactly equivalent to a system that…

There are many benefits and costs that come from people and firms clustering together in space. Agglomeration economies, in particular, are the manifestation of centripetal forces that make larger cities disproportionately more wealthy than…

This paper analyzes the strategic interactions between a profit-maximizing monopolist and a free, capacity-constrained public option. By restricting its own supply, the monopolist intentionally congests the public option and induces…

An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…

Less-salient taxes can ease the classic equality-efficiency trade-off by making people respond less to taxation. But deliberately obscuring taxes may be viewed as dishonest. This creates a three-way trade-off between equality, efficiency,…

The divergence in globalization strategies between the US (retrenchment and polarization) and China (expansion) presents a puzzle that traditional distributional theories fail to fully explain. This paper offers a novel framework by…

In a dynamic economy, we characterize the fiscal policy of the government when it levies distortionary taxes and issues defaultable bonds to finance its stochastic expenditure. Default may occur in equilibrium as it prevents the government…

We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected…

Rationality is often related to optimal decision making. Humans are known to be bounded rational agents. However, recent advances in computing, and other scientific and technical fields along with large amount of data have led to a feeling…

The mechanism behind the emergence of cooperation in both biological and social systems is currently not understood. In particular, human behavior in the Ultimatum game is almost always irrational, preferring mutualistic sharing strategies,…