We construct a model of collective search in which players gradually approach the Pareto frontier. The players have imperfect control over which improvements to the status quo will be considered. Inefficiency takes place due to the difficulty in finding improvements acceptable to both parties. The process is path dependent, with early…

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…

Many commercial transactions require trust, but trust is difficult when one group consistently fears expropriation by another group. If men have a comparative advantage at violence and there is little rule-of-law, then unequal bargaining power can lead women to segregate into industrial ghettos and even to avoid entrepreneurship altogether. 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. If at every step all…

Scholars of democratization have sought to understand two patterns: the observed correlation between income and democracy, and the clustering of democratization events. We develop and estimate a model of learning that explains both patterns. In our model, countries’ own and neighbors’ past experiences shape elites’ beliefs about the effects of…

 We propose a simple informational theory to explain why autocratic regimes introduce local elections. Because citizens have better information on local officials than the distant central government, delegation of authority via local elections improves selection and performance of local officials. However, local officials under elections have…

A receiver wants to learn multidimensional information from a sender, but she has capacity to verify only one dimension. The sender’s payoff depends on the belief he induces, via an exogenously given monotone function. We show that by using a randomized verification strategy, the receiver can learn the sender’s information fully if the…

In this paper we show that social fragmentation can trigger increased electoral competition and improved provision of public goods. We test this using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages of the Philippines. We take advantage of naming conventions to assess intermarriage links between families…