Politics and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from India

By Sam Asher and Paul Novosad

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

Political favoritism affects the allocation of government resources, but is it consequential for growth? Using a close election regression discontinuity design and data from India, we measure the local economic impact of being represented by a politician ...

Gridlock: Ethnic Diversity in Government and the Provision of Public Goods

By Brian Beach and Daniel B. Jones

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2017

How does ethnic diversity in government impact public good provision? We construct a novel dataset linking the ethnicity of California city council candidates to election outcomes and expenditure decisions. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we fi...

Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda

[Symposium: China]

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo--the most prominent Chinese microblogg...

A Review of Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future

By Susan Rose-Ackerman

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017

Capitalism and law go together in Geoffrey M. Hodgson's comprehensive analysis of the intellectual history and practical development of the capitalist system in Western Europe and North America. Given the breadth and depth of Professor Hodgson's reading i...

The Local Political Economy Effects of School Construction in Indonesia

By Monica Martinez-Bravo

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

A by-product of the extension of mass education is the increase in the level of education of those eligible for political offices. This can have a profound impact on the effectiveness of local governments. In this paper, I examine the effects of a large s...

Narrative Economics

By Robert J. Shiller

American Economic Review, April 2017

This address considers the epidemiology of narratives relevant to economic fluctuations. The human brain has always been highly tuned toward narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions, even such basic actions as spending and investing....

Dynamic Agenda Setting

By Ying Chen and Hülya Eraslan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

A party in power can address a limited number of issues. What issues to address--the party's agenda--has dynamic implications because it affects what issues will be addressed in the future. We analyze a model in which the incumbent addresses one issue amo...

Conditional Retrospective Voting in Large Elections

By Ignacio Esponda and Demian Pouzo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

We introduce a solution concept in the context of large elections with private information by embedding a model of boundedly rational voters into an otherwise standard equilibrium setting. A retrospective voting equilibrium (RVE) formalizes the idea that ...

Strategic Vote Trading in Power Sharing Systems

By Dimitrios Xefteris and Nicholas Ziros

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

This paper studies decentralized vote trading in a power sharing system that follows the rules of strategic market games. In particular, we study a two-party election in which prior to the voting stage, voters are free to trade votes for money. Voters hol...

Accountability and Information in Elections

By Scott Ashworth, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, and Amanda Friedenberg

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

Elections are thought to improve voter welfare through two channels: effective accountability (i.e., providing incentives for politicians to take costly effort) and electoral selection (i.e., retaining politicians with characteristics voters value). We ...

Disclosure and Legal Advice

By Yeon-Koo Che and Sergei Severinov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2017

This paper examines how the advice that lawyers provide to their clients affects the disclosure of evidence and the outcome of adjudication, and how the adjudicator should allocate the burden of proof in light of these effects. Despite lawyers' expertise ...

Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

By Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2017

Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories ("fake news"), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the ...

Groupy versus Non-Groupy Social Preferences: Personality, Region, and Political Party

By Rachel E. Kranton and Seth G. Sanders

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper replicates results that some people, when allocating income, are "groupy" and discriminate between in and out groups, but many show no such bias. The paper explores psychometric, demographic, and political correlates. In an M-Turk experiment, n...

Trumping Norms: Lab Evidence on Aggressive Communication before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election

By Jennie Huang and Corinne Low

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper provides evidence from a negotiation experiment that the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump had a profound impact on individual behavior in the lab. Using a Battle of the Sexes game with unstructured communication, we find that post-...

Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID.world

By Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We obse...

Excess Male Infant Mortality: The Gene-Institution Interactions

By Roland Pongou, Barthelemy Kuate Defo, and Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

American Economic Review, May 2017

Excess male mortality at early ages is an important source of child inequality in most societies. We examine how improvement in the quality of political institutions affects the male survival disadvantage. Using data on twins in combination with a natural...

Content-Based Agendas and Qualified Majorities in Sequential Voting

By Andreas Kleiner and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Review, June 2017

We analyze sequential, binary voting schemes in settings where several privately informed agents have single-peaked preferences over a finite set of alternatives, and we focus on robust equilibria that do not depend on assumptions about the players' belie...

The Decentralized Central Bank: A Review Essay on The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve by Peter Conti-Brown

By Narayana R. Kocherlakota

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017

This essay discusses the structure and governance of the Federal Reserve System in light of the many changes in its activities over the past thirty years. Based on this analysis, it argues in favor of four specific reforms: clarification of Congressional ...

The Effect of Labor Migration on the Diffusion of Democracy: Evidence from a Former Soviet Republic

By Toman Barsbai, Hillel Rapoport, Andreas Steinmayr, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration wave that started in the aftermath of the Russian crisis of 1998 strongly affected electoral outco...

Do the Effects of Temporary Ethnic Group Quotas Persist? Evidence from India

By Rikhil R. Bhavnani

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

Do electoral quotas for ethnic groups continue to improve their chances of winning elections after quotas are withdrawn? This is an important question since ethnic group quotas are common, and are often intended to be temporary. Using natural experiments,...