Research

Abstract. Why and how do authoritarian regimes pursue development strategies that eventually undermine their survival, while democracies under similar conditions exhibit different developmental patterns? I develop a dynamic model where education simultaneously fosters human capital and civic culture, which shapes political behavior asymmetrically across regimes. Under autocracy, growing civic culture increases regime change risk, creating a modernization threat that compels rulers to strategically curb investment as development proceeds, resulting in a hump-shaped development path of rapid growth followed by strategic stagnation. Under democracy, civic culture strengthens electoral accountability, but outcomes are history-dependent: weak initial civic foundations trap societies in low-investment equilibria, while sufficiently strong civic culture triggers virtuous cycles of sustained development. This asymmetry—where civic culture threatens autocratic survival but enables democratic accountability—provides a unified framework explaining divergent modernization paths. The model reconciles why some autocracies achieve impressive early growth yet face self-limiting development, while democracies exhibit varying performance depending on civic foundations, offering new insights into the political economy of long-run development.

Abstract. We study the choice of multiple advisers, balancing loyalty, competence, and diverse perspectives. A leader can consult one or both of two advisers. One has views that align closely with the leader’s, but her information is imprecise or correlated with the leader’s. The other is more biased but has independent and more precise information. We find that the leader consults the most informed expert, adding the other adviser only if the additional communication does not hinder truthful advice from the former. If the leader consults both advisers, we paradoxically find that increasing the more biased expert’s bias causes the dismissal of the other adviser. Hence, information trumps political proximity, when seeking advice. Exactly the opposite happens when it comes to delegating decision-making. The leader may choose to delegate, but only to the less biased adviser. The analysis is generalized to the case where the most informed adviser is not necessarily more biased. Reducing the probability that the more informed adviser is also more biased leads to hiring also the other expert. The leader may delegate to the uncertain-bias adviser, although she is possibly more biased, because she is better at aggregating information

Abstract. We study how a principal incentivizes team production using the mere possibility of costly peer monitoring. The principal offers wages and free-rider reporting bonuses, both payable only upon team success, which critically aligns monitoring incentives with productive effort. Without such bonuses, agents facing colleagues' shirking are incentivized to shirk themselves. With large reporting rewards, however, agents prefer to work and monitor shirking peers rather than shirk. Shirking is thus deterred ex ante, and equilibrium involves no actual monitoring. As a result, our mechanism uniquely implements full effort at only the partial implementation cost. That is, unlike previous mechanisms requiring strategic rents to ensure all agents work, such rents are no longer needed. This highlights the preventive role of off-path contractual clauses under limited liability and demonstrates the importance of outcome-contingency in rewarding peer monitoring. Our results remain robust under capacity constraints on monitoring and in sequential production environments.

Abstract. A principal incentivizes a team, when only success or failure of a joint project is observable. The principal wishes that in every equilibrium all agents work rather than shirk. Rather than specifying individual rewards a la Winter (2004), she may subcontract to some agent, promising him a large sum on project success. That agent is empowered to divide the promise among agents as he wishes.  Extensive-Form Rationalizability arguments show how subcontracting can eliminate strategic uncertainty. Simply, there are divisions a subcontractor intending to shirk will not choose. We show subcontracting is cheaper than centralization when all agents are pivotal enough. More generally, our work illustrates the usefulness of structuring organizations to facilitate the flow of strategic information.