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SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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Trade, Institutions and Religious Tolerance: Evidence from India
This paper analyses the incentives that shaped Hindu and Muslim interaction in India’s towns from the rise of Islam to the rise of European intervention in the 17th century; it argues that differences in the degree to which medieval Hindus and…
Policy Dynamics and Inefficiency in a Parliamentary Democracy with Proportional Representation
This paper presents a dynamic model of election, government formation, and legislation in a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation in which the policy chosen in one period becomes the status quo for the next period. The…
Federalism, Taxation, and Economic Growth
We show that federalism will lead to higher economic growth. We present a model of endogenous growth where government services, funded by income and capital taxes, are a component of production. In this model a decentralized government will…
Managerial Contracting and Corporate Social Responsibility
This paper presents a positive theory of corporate social responsibility set in a managerial capitalism context in which managers instead of markets allocate resources, including social expenditures. The theory focuses jointly on the operational…
Partisan Impacts on the Economy: Evidence from Prediction Markets and Close Elections
Political economists interested in discerning the effects of election outcomes on the economy have been hampered by the problem that economic outcomes also influence elections. We sidestep these problems by analyzing movements in economic…
A Positive Theory Of Moral Management, Social Pressure, And Corporate Social Performance
This paper provides a theory of firm behavior motivated by moral duty, self-interest, and social pressure. A morally-managed and a self-interested firm compete in a market in which their corporate social performance (CSP) provides product…
Prediction Markets in Theory and Practice
Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as information markets, idea futures or event futures, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-…
Supreme Court Appointments as a Move-the-Median Game
A three-stage model isolates conditions under which an executive appointment to a collective choice body, such as a court or a regulatory agency, has an immediate bearing on policy. The model strikes a balance between previous formal models that…
Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Entrepreneurship
Milton Friedman argued that the social responsibility of firms is to maximize profits. This paper examines this argument for the economic environment envisioned by Friedman in which citizens can personally give to social causes and can invest in…
Gatekeeping
Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rules that determine who may exercise procedural rights, and in what order. This paper analyzes several two-stage decision-making models, focusing on one in which the…
Partisan Roll Rates in a Nonpartisan Legislature
Credible tests of hypotheses about power require credible measures of power. Roll rates purport to measure the power of the majority party in legislatures. This paper develops and employs a baseline model to assess roll rates. While on the…
Strategic Activism and Nonmarket Strategy
Activist NGOs have increasingly foregone public politics and turned to private politics to change the practices of firms and industries. This paper focuses on private politics, activist strategies, and nonmarket strategies of targets. A formal…
Joe Cannon and the Minority Party: Tyranny or Bipartisanship?
The minority party is rarely featured in empirical research on parties in legislatures, and recent theories of parties in legislatures are rarely neutral and balanced in their treatment of the two parties. This paper makes a case for redressing…
Macro Politics and Micro Models: Cartels and Pivots reconsidered
A framework is introduced for evaluating static micro-analytic theories in dynamic macro-political settings. Within the framework, two theories of lawmaking are compared. Analytically, the predictions of the theories are remarkably similar-…
Parties in Elections, Parties in Government, and Partisan Bias
Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in elections, and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these…
Persistent Media Bias
The news media plays an essential role in society, but surveys indicate that the public views the media as biased. This paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their…
Prediction Markets
We analyze the extent to which simple markets can be used to aggregate disperse information into efficient forecasts of uncertain future events. Drawing together data from a range of prediction contexts, we show that market-generated forecasts…
Testing Theories of Lawmaking
Abstract not available.
The Empirical Content of Adaptive Models
Models with adaptive agents have become increasingly popular in computational sociology (e.g. Macy 1991, Macy and Flache 2002). In this paper we show that at least two important kinds of such models lack empirical content. In the first type…