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.

In this article, we examine the foundations of a rich and diverse literature in economics and derive the likelihood function of simultaneous equation models for discrete data as the invariant distribution of a suitably specified Markov process. This formulation offers a well-defined reduced form of the model and dispenses with the need for controversial recursivity requirements and ad hoc indeterminacy rules. The derivation resolves puzzling paradoxes highlighted in earlier work and shows that the likelihood is unique, proper, coherent, complete, and theoretically grounded in conditional distribution modeling – a framework that has yet to be popularized in economics. We note possible extensions and relevant links with other models, comment on computational issues, and implement the methodology in three empirical applications involving female labor force participation, the interactions between health and wealth, and the interplay between banks’ lending practices and their reliance on assistance from the lender of last resort during the Great Depression.

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.

This primer provides a systematic introduction to proportional representation (PR) electoral systems for scholars and students unfamiliar with their mechanics and political consequences. PR is now used for legislative elections in approximately 118 countries, making it the world’s most common family of electoral systems. However, its formal structure and political effects are often poorly understood outside specialist communities. The primer covers the main families of apportionment algorithms (quota, divisor, and ranked-choice methods), the principal types of PR electoral systems (list PR, STV, mixed, and semi-proportional), and their key structural components, including district magnitude, thresholds, measures of disproportionality, volatility, and the effective number of parties. It surveys major empirical regularities, including Duverger’s Law, the impact of district magnitude on party fragmentation, women’s and minority representation, voter turnout, and coalition formation, before turning to paradoxes and problems, including apportionment paradoxes and the Balinski–Young impossibility theorem, STV Non-Monotonicity and the No-Show paradox, spoilers and ballot-position primacy effects in list PR, and overhang seats and decoy parties in mixed compensatory systems. The primer concludes that every apportionment method is formally flawed, that institutional parameters interact with strategic behavior in ways that frequently produce unexpected outcomes, and that the empirical regularities anchoring the field rest on identification strategies that are vulnerable to the endogeneity of electoral institutions. A Glossary of key concepts is included as an Appendix.

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.

Mixed electoral systems combine majoritarian and proportional rules within a single institutional framework, promising what Shugart and Wattenberg (2001) called "the best of both worlds": local accountability alongside representational fairness. This article surveys the family of mixed systems—parallel, compensatory, proportional, and combined—and examines whether their constitutional promise has been fulfilled. Simulations of seat allocation under alternative mixed designs demonstrate that these systems generate markedly different seat distributions, undermining any unified claim about their representational properties. A systematic analysis of the paradoxes that have emerged over a quarter century of practice—excessive complexity, decoy parties, manipulative coalition coordination, uncontrolled parliamentary growth, and "zombie" legislators—reveals that strategic actors routinely exploit the gap between constitutional aspiration and institutional detail. We conclude by assessing how variation in the constitutional entrenchment of mixed systems shapes both the scope for manipulation and the capacity for reform. A Glossary of key concepts is included as an Appendix.

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.