Voters and the Trade-off between Policy Stability and Responsiveness (with Wiola Dziuda)
Journal of Public Economics, 2024, Volume 232:105093
What it's about: In each period, a voter elects a leftist or a rightist party, which then chooses a policy. All three players want the policy to respond to a changing state but also care about policy stability. Do electoral pressures and parties' polarized preferences lead to excessive policy volatility or excessive inertia?
Gridlock and Inefficient Policy Instruments (with David Austen-Smith, Bard Harstad, and Wiola Dziuda)
Theoretical Economics, 2019, Volume 14 (4), Pages 1483–1534
What it's about: Two parties negotiate over when to implement and when to repeal a policy intervention (e.g., fiscal austerity) in response to recurring shocks. They can intervene with either of two policy instruments (e.g., tax increase or spending cut), one being Pareto superior. Will they intervene with the efficient one?
Dynamic Pivotal Politics (with Wiola Dziuda)
American Political Science Review, 2018, Volume 112 (8), Pages 580-601
What it's about: Legislators vote on whether to change the policy in response to changing circumstances. In contrast to static models of lawmaking, the status quo is inherited from the previous legislature and forward-looking legislators do not vote sincerely. Strategic voting exacerbates the inertial effect of checks and balances, mitigate institutional biases, and depend on electoral expectations.
Crossborder Externalities and Cooperation among Representative Democracies
European Economic Review, 2017, Volume 91, Pages 180–208
What it's about: Two countries elect their representative to (Nash) bargain over how much to contribute to a global public good. Whether cooperation is beneficial depends neither on voters' preferences, nor on the spillovers, countries' bargaining power or efficiency. Instead, it depends only on the elasticity of the demand for the global public good.
Dynamic Collective Choice with Endogenous Status quo (with Wiola Dziuda)
Journal of Political Economy, 2016,Volume 124, Issue 4, Pages 1148-1186
What it's about: Two players repeatedly bargain over whether to change a collective decision in an environment in which preferences change over time, and today's decision becomes tomorrow's status quo. The equilibrium exhibits strategic polarization and excessive policy inertia.
Influential Opinion Leaders (with Jakub Steiner and Colin Stewart)
The Economic Journal, Volume 124, Issue 581, December 2014, Pages 1147-1167
What it's about: Citizens decide whether to participate to a social movements after observing a private signal and the decision of better informed leaders. The leaders have a negligible mass, and each leader is observed by a negligible mass of individuals . Can they influence the outcome of the social movement?
Federal Directives, Local Discretion, and the Majority Rule
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Volume 8, issue 1, January 2013, Pages 41-74.
What it's about: To improve policy coordination, the citizens of a federation decide by majority rule a common policy space within which each local jurisdiction has residual discretion. Can inadequate and excessively rigid federal interventions emerge in this perfectly democratic federation?
Coordination in Heterogeneous Federal Systems
Journal of Public Economics, Volume 95, Issues 7–8, August 2011, Pages 900–912
What it's about: A federation of jurisdictions with heterogeneous preferences have to coordinate their policies because policy heterogeneity is inherently costly (e.g., regulation of tradable sectors, standards, diplomatic policies). Contrary to the common wisdom, decentralization dominates unitarian centralization when cross-border externalities are sufficiently severe and/or symmetric.
A Case for Divided Government (joint with Wiola Dziuda)
What it's about: Two political parties with polarized preferences must decide whether to reform the status quo on two policy dimensions: a consensual and a divisive one. Crucially, they have time to reform only one policy dimension. A voter, whose preferences lie equidistantly between the parties, decides which party should hold the agenda and the veto power in the government. Will the voter chooses unified or divided control of the government? Will the government prioritize a divisive or a consensual reform?
Coverage in uc3nomics
The Politics of Repeal (joint with Alvaro Delgado Vega and Wiola Dziuda)
What it's about: An incumbent chooses whether to implement a reform which can be partisan or common-interest. The opposition cannot veto its decision but can (credibly) announce whether it will repeal or uphold the reform if elected. The type of the reform is observed by the incumbent and the opposition but not by the voter. The voter observes parties' decisions and chooses whether to reelect the incumbent. Will the opposition commit to repeal only partisan policies? Can an institutionally powerless opposition discipline the incumbent via its electoral promise?
Coverage in uc3nomics
Agglomeration, Segregation, and Social Welfare in Group Formation Games
What it's about: We consider a game in which each player has to choose in which community to live. Each player cares about the intrinsic characteristic of the community she chooses but also about the number of other players who choose that community. Will the Nash equilibrium exhibit excessive agglomeration, or excessive fragmentation?