Drug traffickers sometimes divide profits via peaceful agreement. Other times they fight. We propose a model to investigate this variation, focusing on the state’s effort to enforce prohibition. Seizing illegal goods generally increases trafficker profits, and higher profits fuel violence. Killing kingpins makes crime bosses short-sighted,...

We provide a novel rationale for why extreme forecasts are often more persuasive than moderate ones. We show that when people look for the most likely explanation of the views or opinions they observe, they will adopt an explanation according to which moderate views are just statistical derivatives of extreme views.

This paper studies the effects of local political concentration on long-run economic development in Brazil. Contrary to what is observed in other contexts and time periods, we document that municipalities with higher levels of political concentration prior to Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985) achieved higher levels of development in...

We develop a framework to study the dynamics of vote trading over multiple binary issues. We prove that there always exists a stable allocation of votes that is reachable in a finite number of trades, for any number of voters and issues, any separable preference profile, and any restrictions on the coalitions that may form.