Andrei Gomberg

When the State is Untrustworthy: Public Finance and Private Banking in Porfirian Mexico

All sovereign governments face a commitment problem: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the hands of the government. Mexicos government in the 1880s used neither solution. It compensated its creditors by enabling them to extract rents from the rest of the economy. These rents came through special privileges over banking services and the right to administer federal taxes. Returns were extremely high: as long as creditors believed that the government would refrain from confiscating all their assets (let alone repaying their debts) less than twice a decade, they would break even.

Anonymity in large societies

In a social choice model with an infinite number of agents, there may occur “equal size” coalitions that a preference aggregation rule should treat in the same manner. We introduce an axiom of equal treatment with respect to a measure of coalition size and explore its interaction with common axioms of social choice. We show that, provided the measure space is sufficiently rich in coalitions of the same measure, the new axiom is the natural extension of the concept of anonymity, and in particular plays a similar role in the characterization of preference aggregation rules.

Sorting equilibrium in a multi-jurisdiction model

Abstract This paper analyzes a general model of an economy with heterogeneous individuals choosing among two jurisdictions, such as towns or political parties. Each jurisdiction is described by its constitution, where a constitution is defined as a mapping from all possible population partitions into the (possibly multidimensional) policy space. This study is the first to establish sufficient conditions for existence of sorting equilibria in a two-jurisdiction model for a policy space of an arbitrary dimension.

Endogenous platforms: the case of many parties

We analyze existence of equilibrium in a one-dimensional model of endogenous party platforms and more than two parties. The platforms proposed by parties depend on their membership composition. The policy implemented is a function of the different proposals and the vote distribution among such proposals. It is shown that if voters are sincere there is always an equilibrium regardless of the number of parties. In the case of strategic voting behavior, existence of equilibrium can be shown provided a subadditivity condition on the outcome function holds.

Vote Revelation: Empirical Content of Scoring Rules

In this paper I consider choice correspondences defined on an extended domain: the decisions are assumed to be taken not by individuals, but by committees and, in addition to the budget sets, committee composition is observable and variable. In this setting, I establish restrictions on the choice structures that are implied by sincere scoring decision-making by rational committee members.

Negative Advertising During Mexico’s 2012 Presidential Campaign

We construct a unique dataset that includes the total number of ads placed by all competing political parties during Mexico’s 2012 presidential campaign, and detailed information on the content of the ads aired every day during the course of the campaign by each of the competing parties. To illustrate its potential usefulness, we describe the evolution each party’s negative advertising strategies (defined as ads that explicitly mention each of the other competing candidates or parties) over the course of the campaign, and relate it to the expected vote share in the general election for each of the competing candidates based on the available surveys. We show that parties’ choice of negative advertising strategies are consistent with a model in which ads do affect voting intentions, and negative (positive) advertising affect negatively (positively) the vote share of the mentioned party, and positively (negatively) that of all other competing parties.