Department of Economics

Abstract

Monogamy is ethnographically peculiar as an ethical ideal and emerged in the Early Middle Ages as a form of sexual repression imposed by the Church and employed by secular authorities to decompose powerful elite lineages. In its continued modern form, the independent and isolated monogamous household has been advanced as socially optimal by economists and as essential to civilization by anthropologists.   Although marriage, as a rightful claim on the sexuality of a woman, is a nearly universal institution, recent legislation and judicial opinion in both Europe and the United States have abrogated this basic marital right with the new crime of “marital rape”, thereby undermining the essential and defining characteristic of marriage. It is argued herein that these changes reflect the loss of relevance and significance of the domestic household to contemporary systems of capital accumulation; and it is in this new context that same-sex marriage becomes feasible.

We experimentally examine whether and how the indexing strategy used by exchange traded funds (ETFs) affects the prices of the constituent assets. We study this issue in both the primary market (ETF creations and redemptions using bots as authorized participants) and the secondary market. The experiment includes three environments: (i) no ETF, (ii) an equal weighted ETF, and (iii) an unequal, market cap weighted ETF. We find that compared to the baseline of no ETFs, the introduction of ETFs significantly affects the relative prices of the constituent assets in the equal weighted ETF but not in the unequal weighted, market-cap based ETF. The introduction of ETFs also affects order imbalances and bid-ask spreads particularly for the asset in shortest supply.

Electoral reforms to first-past-the-post are often expected to consolidate party systems, but parties can instead coordinate without merging. We develop a partition-function framework distinguishing party consolidation from district-level coordination (“Duvergerian moves”), where allies strategically withdraw candidates across districts to maximize seats. We motivate the argument with the 2024 French legislative election, where coordinated withdrawals by NFP and Ensemble sharply reduced multi-candidate runoffs and helped block National Rally. We then study Poland’s Senate after the 2011 switch to single-member districts. Despite limited change in the effective number of parties, opposition parties progressively refined district coordination, culminating in near-complete one-candidate-per-district arrangements in 2019. We propose three coordination indices to measure the extent and effectiveness of such strategies, showing how coordination can reproduce majoritarian incentives while preserving party identities.

The primacy effect in elections refers to the tendency for voters to choose candidates listed first on a ballot more frequently than those listed lower. This phenomenon occurs across various electoral systems and can significantly impact election outcomes. Three main types of primacy effects exist: candidate primacy, party primacy, and list primacy. The strength of these effects depends on factors such as electoral system design, election characteristics, and voter attributes. Causes include limited voter knowledge, time constraints, and cognitive biases. Mitigation strategies involve randomizing ballot order and improving voter education. While measures can reduce its impact, the primacy effect remains a persistent influence in elections due to its roots in human behavior.

The article explores the challenges of providing Western electoral system advice to emerg-ing democracies, drawing on experiences of Estonia and Poland in the format of a historical recollection of attempted electoral reforms and electoral engineering. It proposes a tentative five-phase sequence of attitudes toward foreign advice: initial acceptance of pre-existing rules, recognition of the need for reforms, attempts to reinvent electoral systems, eager adoption of foreign advice, and eventual reliance on local expertise with selective use of external input. Using Estonia as a case study, Taagepera details his role in introducing electoral system op-tions during the transition from Soviet rule, highlighting the shift from external influence to local politicking. Kaminski contrasts this with Poland, where the absence of expert electoral advice during the 1989 Round Table negotiations inadvertently facilitated Solidarity’s victory, underscoring the impact of electoral ignorance. The article assesses the validity of Western advice, focusing on proportionality, government stability, and party constellations, and ad-vocates for simple, stable electoral rules in emerging democracies. They conclude that while a science of electoral systems is developing, its applicability to unstable democracies remains limited, and feedback from these contexts offers modest insights into established electoral theories, such as Duverger’s law. The article explores the challenges of providing Western electoral system advice to emerg-ing democracies, drawing on experiences of Estonia and Poland in the format of a historical recollection of attempted electoral reforms and electoral engineering. It proposes a tentative five-phase sequence of attitudes toward foreign advice: initial acceptance of pre-existing rules, recognition of the need for reforms, attempts to reinvent electoral systems, eager adoption of foreign advice, and eventual reliance on local expertise with selective use of external input. Using Estonia as a case study, Taagepera details his role in introducing electoral system op-tions during the transition from Soviet rule, highlighting the shift from external influence to local politicking. Kaminski contrasts this with Poland, where the absence of expert electoral advice during the 1989 Round Table negotiations inadvertently facilitated Solidarity’s victory, underscoring the impact of electoral ignorance. The article assesses the validity of Western advice, focusing on proportionality, government stability, and party constellations, and ad-vocates for simple, stable electoral rules in emerging democracies. They conclude that while a science of electoral systems is developing, its applicability to unstable democracies remains limited, and feedback from these contexts offers modest insights into established electoral theories, such as Duverger’s law.

The article explores the challenges of providing Western electoral system advice to emerg-ing democracies, drawing on experiences of Estonia and Poland in the format of a historical recollection of attempted electoral reforms and electoral engineering. It proposes a tentative five-phase sequence of attitudes toward foreign advice: initial acceptance of pre-existing rules, recognition of the need for reforms, attempts to reinvent electoral systems, eager adoption of foreign advice, and eventual reliance on local expertise with selective use of external input. Using Estonia as a case study, Taagepera details his role in introducing electoral system op-tions during the transition from Soviet rule, highlighting the shift from external influence to local politicking. Kaminski contrasts this with Poland, where the absence of expert electoral advice during the 1989 Round Table negotiations inadvertently facilitated Solidarity’s victory, underscoring the impact of electoral ignorance. The article assesses the validity of Western advice, focusing on proportionality, government stability, and party constellations, and ad-vocates for simple, stable electoral rules in emerging democracies. They conclude that while a science of electoral systems is developing, its applicability to unstable democracies remains limited, and feedback from these contexts offers modest insights into established electoral theories, such as Duverger’s law. The article explores the challenges of providing Western electoral system advice to emerg-ing democracies, drawing on experiences of Estonia and Poland in the format of a historical recollection of attempted electoral reforms and electoral engineering. It proposes a tentative five-phase sequence of attitudes toward foreign advice: initial acceptance of pre-existing rules, recognition of the need for reforms, attempts to reinvent electoral systems, eager adoption of foreign advice, and eventual reliance on local expertise with selective use of external input. Using Estonia as a case study, Taagepera details his role in introducing electoral system op-tions during the transition from Soviet rule, highlighting the shift from external influence to local politicking. Kaminski contrasts this with Poland, where the absence of expert electoral advice during the 1989 Round Table negotiations inadvertently facilitated Solidarity’s victory, underscoring the impact of electoral ignorance. The article assesses the validity of Western advice, focusing on proportionality, government stability, and party constellations, and ad-vocates for simple, stable electoral rules in emerging democracies. They conclude that while a science of electoral systems is developing, its applicability to unstable democracies remains limited, and feedback from these contexts offers modest insights into established electoral theories, such as Duverger’s law.

Bargaining is widely used in monetary, labor and finance models to determine terms of trade. The chosen bargaining solution can matter for welfare analysis, for example when agents are liquidity constrained. Here we report on an experiment in which buyers and sellers engage in semi-structured bargaining to determine the terms of trade with the aim of evaluating the empirical relevance of two bargaining solutions, the generalized Nash bargaining solution and Kalai's proportional bargaining solution. These bargaining solutions predict different outcomes when buyers are constrained in their money holdings. We first use the case when the buyer is not liquidity constrained to estimate the bargaining power parameter, which we find to be equal to 1/2. Then, imposing liquidity constraints on buyers, we find strong evidence in support of the Kalai proportional solution. Our findings have policy implications, e.g., for the welfare cost of inflation in search-theoretic models of money.

We seek to assess how informational challenges in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) systems contribute to higher incidence of “faulty” votes compared to majoritarian systems. We define three types of faulty votes: spoilt votes and votes attributable to ballot primacy or list primacy effects. Using data from simultaneously held Polish OLPR and SMD local elections, we find significantly higher rates of faulty votes in OLPR systems than in SMD systems—an estimated 12.87% more eligible voters cast a faulty vote under OLPR. The difference is even more stark when calculated as a percentage of actual voters, with over 25% more faulty votes under OLPR. Our findings suggest that the increased complexity of OLPR systems leads to lower-quality votes. This “PR blow” is similar in magnitude but opposite in direction to the well-documented “PR boost” in turnout. We offer policy recommendations to mitigate faulty votes in OLPR systems, including simplifying ballots, using smaller districts, and randomizing candidate order.