The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forever changed the face of electoral equality in the United States. Today, almost forty years later, the Act is considered one of the most pivotal pieces of federal legislation in our country’s history and the “most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted.” Congress has revisited various segments of the Act ave times since its enactment. A key 19...

The ever-increasing number of expatriates has fed the political debate on the voting rights of Swiss abroad over the last two decades. More than the right to vote itself, the effective exercise of voting rights has become a much-discussed issue. Swiss expatriates are able to vote at the federal level, which means they are invited to vote in popular votes and referendums up to four times a year ...

I study the large premium (82 percent) attributed to voting shares on the Milan Stock Exchange. The premium varies according to the ownership structare and the concentration of the voting rights, and it can be rationalized in the presence of enormous private benefits of control. A case study seems to indicate that in Italy private benefits of control can easily be worth more than 60 percent of ...

This paper studies the relationship between monetary incentives to encourage citizens’ contributions to a social good (voting, charity donation, etc.) and the society’s consideration for that good in the presence of social signaling. We establish that, no matter how much citizens value the social good, low incentives (or disincentives) may emerge as the unique majority voting outcome when conce...

Recent work (Hu and Black (2005, 2007, 2008); Dekel and Wolinsky (2012)) has detailed the twin issues of empty voting and hidden/morphable ownership. The former arises when an actor has control rights over a corporation but no economic interest in that corporation, such as when an investor borrows shares. The latter arises when a shareholder has an economic or voting interest in a corporation b...

Kemeny proposed a voting scheme which is distinguished by the fact that it is the unique voting scheme that is neutral, consistent, and Condorcet. Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick showed that determining the winner in Kemeny’s system is NP-hard. We provide a stronger lower bound and an upper bound matching the lower bound, namely, we show that determining the winner in Kemeny’s system is complete fo...

Ethereum’s public distributed ledger can issue tokenised voting rights that are tradable on crypto-asset exchanges by potentially anyone. Ethereum thus enables global, unincorporated associations to conduct governance experiments. Such experiments crucial Decentralised Finance (DeFi). DeFi is a nascent field of unlicensed, unregulated, and non-custodial financial services utilise ledgers crypto...