Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a positive theory of this situation and shows when a small change in parameter values has a multiplier effect on exploitation. The multiplier…

What role do journalists and media owners play in slanting media content? In this paper, we open the black box of news production and investigate whether and how journalists themselves decide to bias the news and shield content production from owner influence. To do so, we build a novel dataset on hosts and guests in all French radio and…

Liquid Democracy. Two Experiments: Under Liquid Democracy (LD), decisions are taken by referendum, but voters are allowed to delegate their votes to other voters. LD has been heralded as the golden medium between direct and representative democracy: better than the former because experts can be delegated votes and thus weigh more; better…

New online platforms have played a central role in political campaigns over the last decades by allowing small contributors to intervene in local and national electoral politics, and potentially mitigate the capture of the political process by large donors. Their impact has not yet been evaluated. While the focus of the literature has mainly…