We examine the design of lawmaking institutions when advocates have agenda setting power and there is randomness in the status quo laws eligible for reform. The institutional designer maximizes voter welfare. We find that the optimal arrangement consists of two lawmaking institutions that must agree to enact any reforms. The institutions do not share preferences with one another or with the median voter. As a result, gridlock arises: the institutions reject some reforms that the median voter favors. However, when reform succeeds, it tends to be modest in scope and to more closely track what the median voter prefers. The optimal institutional design trades off the cost of failing to change law due to gridlock against the benefit of forcing advocates to moderate their proposals and offer more centrist reforms. Surprisingly, voters are best served by a pair of polarized and unrepresentative institutions.
We examine the design of lawmaking institutions when advocates have agenda setting power and there is randomness in the status quo laws eligible for...
Donald Trump, a president who has proven himself to be highly transactional and keen on reducing debt, may find a potentially trillion-dollar foreign...
Extraordinary times beget extraordinary measures. Multiple national emergencies during the past quarter century have generated a pitched debate as to...
We introduce altruism into standard models of bargaining and explore its implications for the Coase Theorem. A strict interpretation of the Coase...
The history of public policy is littered with failures to solve large-scale social problems using interventions derived from behavioral science...
The Supreme Court has twice held since 2020 that statutory restrictions on the President’s removal power violate Article II of the U.S. Constitution...
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past...
Countries hit by unexpected crises often look to their overseas diasporas for assistance. Some countries have tapped into this generosity of their...
A defining feature of the past two and a half centuries has been the extraordinary and unprecedented velocity of technological change. The rush of new...
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
There is concern that present-biased agents incur too much debt because of its deferred costs – concern that has influenced regulation of consumer...
Lenders are perfectly free to decide for themselves whether, when, how, to whom and on what terms they will extend credit to a sovereign borrower. But...
False information causes harm, threatening individuals, groups, and society. Many people struggle to judge the veracity of the information around them...
Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...
This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek...
Income inequality is a national preoccupation, and the public’s imagination is captured by the astronomical incomes of Valley tech billionaires and...
There is a live debate going on over whether antitrust should take a broader view of the economics of market concentration. When antitrust reformers...