We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local exploit citizens’ informational advantage in keeping officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As increases, the autocrat limits role of elected bodies to regain argue these insights can explain introduction village rural China and subsequent erosion autonomy years later. constru...

There is a growing evidence that political corruption is often closely associated with the rent seeking activities of special interest groups. This paper examines the nature of the interaction between the lobbying activities of special interest groups and the incidence of political corruption and determines whether electoral competition can eliminate political corruption. We obtain some strikin...

Periodic elections are the main instrument through which voters can hold politicians accountable. From this perspective term limits, which restrict voters’ ability to reward politicians with re-election, appear counterproductive. We show that despite the disciplining effect of elections, term limits can be ex ante welfare improving from the perspective of voters. By reducing the value of holdin...

Preventive policy measures such as bailouts often pass parliament very narrowly. We present a model of asymmetric information between politicians and voters which rationalizes this narrow parliamentary outcome. A successful preventive policy impedes the verifi cation of its own necessity. When policy intervention is necessary but voters disagree ex-ante, individual politicians have an incentive...

We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

The literature on the electronic mail game shows that players’ mutual expectations may lock them into requiring an inefficiently large number of confirmations and confirmations of confirmations from one another. This paper shows that this result hinges on the assumption that, with the exception of the first message, each player can only send a message when receiving an immediately preceding mes...

A hierarchy is considered in which those agents who perform better advance to higher levels. When agents are heterogeneous and endowed with simple behavioral rules, Harrington (1998a) showed that agents at high levels tend to be rigid, in the sense that their behavior is unresponsive to their environment, relative to agents at low levels. In the current paper, agents are homogeneous but sophist...

We study the effect of financial disclosure on the selection of politicians, exploiting the staggering of Indian state assembly elections to identify the effect of disclosure laws. We document a 13 percentage point increase in exit of winning candidates post-disclosure, indicating that disclosure has a large effect on politician self-selection. This selection coincides with higher probability o...