We study how the closeness of electoral race affect the number of invalid ballots under the traditional paper-ballot voting technology. Using a large dataset from the Italian parliamentary elections in 1994-2001, we find a strong positive correlation between the closeness of electoral race and...

Is the decline in voter turnout an indicator of a worse health of a representative democracy? We build a simple probabilistic-voting model with endogenous turnout to address this question. We ?nd that a lower turnout caused by a higher cost of voting implies higher political rents. Contrarily, a...

Mission-driven nonprofi?t organizations compete for donations through fundrais- ing activities. Such competition can lead to inefficient outcomes, if nonpro?fits impose ex- ternalities on each others? output. This paper studies the design of sustainable voluntary cooperation agreements, using a...

Randomized controlled trials (RCT) have become a dominant empirical tool in applied economics. The internal validity of RCTs crucially depends on the (implicit) assumption that the procedure assigning subjects to treatment and control groups has no effect on behavior. We show theoretically that...

The Ramón y Cajal Program promotes the hiring of top researchers in Spanish R&D centers and academic institutions. The centralized mechanism associated to the Program is analyzed. The paper models it as a two-sided matching market and studies if it provides the incentives to increase the...

In this paper we present a model of implementation based on the idea that agents renegotiate unfeasible allocations. We characterize the maximal set of Social Choice Correspondences that can be implemented in Nash Equilibrium with a class of renegotiation functions that do not reward agents for...

In a common-values election with two candidates voters receive a signal about which candidate is superior. They can acquire information that improves the precision of the signal. Electors differ in their information acquisition costs. For large electorates a non negligible fraction of voters...

We analyze the evolution on the design of a policy measure promoted by the Spanish Government: the Ramón y Cajal Program. In the first calls of the Program, an eligibility requirement for a researcher was a preacceptance from at least one Spanish research insti- tution. This requirement was...

A common assumption in Political Science literature is policy commitment: candidates maintain their electoral promises. We drop such assumption and we show that costless electoral campaign can be an effective way of transmitting information to voters. The result is robust to relevant equilibrium...

The paper studies two games of capacity manipulation in hospital-intern markets. The focus is on the stability of Nash equilibrium outcomes. We provide minimal necessary and sufficient conditions guaranteeing the existence of pure strategy Nash Equilibria and the stability of outcomes.