Common agency lobbying over coalitions and policy

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a proto-coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policy within that coalition. The equilibrium policy in the legislative bargaining stage maximizes the aggregate policy utility of the coalition members and the lobbies, but lobbying can also lead to the preservation of the status quo and lobby-induced gridlock. When the status quo does not persist, the policy outcome is largely determined by the selection of a coalition, since legislative bargaining under unanimity within the coalition leads to a coalition-efficient policy regardless of the identity of the proposer. An example is presented to identify the types of equilibria and provide a full characterization of an equilibrium.     

Matching auction with winner’s curse and imperfect financial markets

This paper explains how and why the Matching Auctions work better with Imperfect Financial Markets. We show that an efficient outsider can obtain a “good” project even if the insider has informational advantage.     

Post‐Cameralist Governance: Towards a Robust Political Economy of Bureaucracy

I develop a robust political economy of bureaucracy by highlighting the conditions necessary for hierarchical administrative bodies to govern protectively and productively, but not predatorily. These conditions are residual claimancy and jurisdictional competition. I make this argument by exploring a post‐cameralist interpretation of governance. Cameralism arose as a governance philosophy in the fractured principalities of seventeenth‐century Germany following the Thirty Years' War. Post‐cameralism focuses not on particular cameralist governance strategies but on a paradigm which sees governance as an activity provided within a larger exchange order, rather than imposing itself on that order as in more conventional treatments of public economics. While a post‐cameralist conception of governance comes with its own challenges, such as tensions with normative visions that promote self‐governance, it nonetheless presents an intriguing synthesis of monocentric and polycentric insights.     

OPTIONS TO THE REALM: A COST NEUTRAL PROPOSAL TO IMPROVE POLITICAL INCENTIVES

In this article, we draw on the literature on political property rights, political accountability, and strategic management and entrepreneurship to propose a cost neutral reform aimed at promoting long‐run economic prosperity. We propose replacing politicians' defined benefit pensions with a financial contract that is tied to economic performance. In particular, we propose a contract that pays out a lump sum to a politician 30 years after their election if real gross domestic product per capita is above some preset benchmark. Furthermore, we show that the contract can be priced such that it is cost neutral in terms of present value with a defined‐benefit pension. We argue that this contract provides a net benefit to society. (JEL D70, D72)     

Wealth inequality and collective action

We study the effect of inequality in the distribution of endowments of private inputs (e.g., land, wealth) that are complementary in production with collective inputs (e.g., contribution to public goods such as irrigation and extraction from common-property resources) on efficiency in a class of collective action problems. We focus on characterizing the joint surplus maximizing level of inequality, making due distinction between contributors and non-contributors, in a framework that allows us to consider a wide variety of collective action problems ranging from pure public goods to impure public goods to commons. We show that while efficiency increases with greater equality within the groups of contributors and non-contributors, so long the externalities (positive or negative) are significant, there is an optimal degree of inequality between these groups.     

DEALING WITH UNCERTAINTY: ROBUST RULES IN MONETARY POLICY

We argue that in seeking to insure against model uncertainty, monetary policy makers are often ready to trade ex post performance for greater certainty in the outcome. They thus look for rules that although not optimal ex post, have certain properties that qualify them as robust. We apply first, Gul's approach of ‘disappointment’ aversion to describe policy makers' aversion to uncertainty and then define the properties the notion of ‘robustness’ entails. With these two tools we then link the desirability of such robust rules to the degree of policy makers' aversion to uncertainty. We thus show that provided such robust rules exist, a larger degree of disappointment aversion leads to a greater emphasis on robustness in policy implementation.     

Gross substitutes and complements: A simple generalization

We extend the gross substitutes and complements framework (Sun and Yang, 2006). Competitive equilibrium with indivisible goods exists under significantly weaker, intuitive and interpretable conditions. A generalized dynamic double-track procedure (Sun and Yang, 2008, 2009) finds the competitive equilibrium outcome.