Carlos Maravall Rodríguez

Ph.D. New York University (2004)

Visiting Professor U. Carlos III, Spain

Welcome to my homepage.
I am a job market candidate.

So far, my work has analyzed formal models of political economics. The main paper of my thesis is now revised and resubmitted to the Advances / Contributions series of the Berkeley Electronic Journals in Theoretical Economics.
Research

This paper considers a model where voters have differences of opinion on some issues (they have ideal points in some space, as in the Downsian model) and agree on others (the quality of candidates). I show that if the quality of candidates is unobserved (making candidates ex-ante identical in the eye of voters, as in the Downsian model), but revealed at the time of the election, the model can explain how candidates compete in many dimensions at a time, as (perfect Bayesian) Nash equilibria exist. This is a characteristic not explained by the classic Downsian model, as shown in Plott (1967) and McKelvey (1976).

The qualitative differences among candidates can also result in platform divergence, but need not. That is, the stronger candidate can implement policies away from the median, but need not. This finding is in contrast with other papers that can either explain divergence or convergence to the median, but do not have equilibria with both. That is, the set of policies that can be implemented in my model is convex and centered at the median, with the size of the set parameterized by the difference the stronger candidate has with respect to the weaker one.

You can find this paper here.

As instructor I regularly receive a grade of 4 out of 5 in teaching satisfaction from students. As teaching assistant at the department of economics of NYU, I was the single department nominee for the single Dean's Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in the Social Sciences (vita).