Ph.D. Candidate in Economics, Princeton University.

Degree expected May 2010.

Job Market Paper

Reputation and Accountability in Repeated Elections [Download PDF]

Abstract:

This paper studies a model of infinitely repeated elections in which voters attempt simultaneously to select competent politicians and to provide them with incentives to exert costly effort. Voters are unable to incentivize effort if they base their reelection decisions only on incumbent reputation. However, equilibria in which voters use reputation-dependent performance cutoffs (RDC) to make reelections decisions exist and support positive effort. In these equilibria, politicians’ effort is decreasing in reputation, and expected performance is decreasing in tenure. Like the equilibria in Ferejohn 1986, RDC equilibria rely on voters being indifferent between reelecting incumbents and electing challengers. I show that this voter-indifference condition is closely related to weak renegotiation-proofness (Farrell and Maskin 1989). Read Paper...