[Replication] The Closed Form and Its Sharp Corollaries: A Formal Replication of Political Accountability under Moral Hazard

Abstract. Acharya, Lipnowski, and Ramos (2025) characterize the voter-optimal re-election rule in an infinite-horizon moral-hazard model and read its career dynamics as the optimum's output, not accountability failure. This paper re-derives the model independently. Every closed form and threshold across eleven proof targets reproduces in symbolic algebra; four auxiliary steps are accepted by reference. A blind reconstruction from the abstract and introduction alone recovered the recursive promised-utility architecture, the effort-tracks-spread mechanism, and all four signed predictions, so the architecture is robustly reachable once one adopts the optimal-equilibrium program the original signposts (n=1; the rebuild was primed by those predictions). The novel finding concerns the outcome technology: a deterministic outcome makes a first-term failure perfectly informative about type and the crisp removal rule statable; a stochastic signal blurs it into a probabilistic threshold. The cost-form divergence only confirms the authors' General-costs transport; the reframe rides on the robust directional results.