The Long-Run Effects of School Racial Diversity on Political Identity

By Stephen B. Billings, Eric Chyn, and Kareem Haggag

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2021

How do early-life experiences shape political identity? We examine the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, an event that led to large changes in school racial composition. Using administrative data, we compare party affiliation in a...

Implementation by Vote-Buying Mechanisms

By Jon X. Eguia and Dimitrios Xefteris

American Economic Review, September 2021

Vote-buying mechanisms allow agents to express any level of support for their preferred alternative at an increasing cost. Focusing on large societies with wealth inequality, we prove that the family of binary social choice rules implemented by well-behav...

From Weber to Kafka: Political Instability and the Overproduction of Laws

By Gabriele Gratton, Luigi Guiso, Claudio Michelacci, and Massimo Morelli

American Economic Review, September 2021

With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a st...

Media, Pulpit, and Populist Persuasion: Evidence from Father Coughlin

By Tianyi Wang

American Economic Review, September 2021

I study the political impact of the first populist radio personality in American history. Father Charles Coughlin blended populist demagoguery, anti-Semitism, and fascist sympathies to create a hugely popular radio program that attracted 30 million weekly...

The Political Premium of Television Celebrity

By Heyu Xiong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

This paper studies the electoral consequences of television stardom through the career of Ronald Reagan. I utilize quasi-experimental variation in television reception to estimate the causal effect of celebrity exposure on political support. I find that...

Direct Democracy Works

By John G. Matsusaka

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2005

The purpose of this essay is to describe the practice and theory of the increasingly important political phenomenon of direct democracy and the main lessons from the scholarly literature. Many questions remain to be answered, but the emerging view is that...

Political Selection

[Symposium: Institutions]

By Timothy Besley

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

Almost every major episode of economic change over the past 200 years of political history has been associated with key personalities coming to power with a commitment to these changes. But if such dynamic leaders are so important, then we need to underst...

Voter Turnout and Preference Aggregation

By Kei Kawai, Yuta Toyama, and Yasutora Watanabe

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2021

We study how voter turnout affects the aggregation of preferences in elections. Under voluntary voting, election outcomes disproportionately aggregate the preferences of voters with low voting cost and high preference intensity. We show identification of ...

Democracy and Aid Donorship

By Angelika J. Budjan and Andreas Fuchs

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2021

Almost half of the world's states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article introduces a new dataset on aid giving that covers all countries in the world, both rich and po...

The Economics of Policing and Public Safety

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Emily Owens and Bocar Ba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

The efficiency of any police action depends on the relative magnitude of its crime-reducing benefits and legitimacy costs. Policing strategies that are socially efficient at the city level may be harmful at the local level, because the distribution of d...

Steven D. Levitt: 2003 John Bates Clark Medalist

By James M. Poterba

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2005

Steve's Clark Medal citation mentions his path-breaking contributions to the economics of crime and to the political economy of campaign finance. This paper describes Steve's research in each of these areas, as well as his contributions on a range of othe...

Delegation in Veto Bargaining

By Navin Kartik, Andreas Kleiner, and Richard Van Weelden

American Economic Review, December 2021

A proposer requires a veto player's approval to change a status quo. Proposer is uncertain about Vetoer's preferences. We show that Vetoer is typically given a non-singleton menu, or delegation set, of options to pick from. The optimal set balances the ex...

Mass Atrocities and Their Prevention

By Charles H. Anderton and Jurgen Brauer

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2021

Counting conservatively, data show about 100 million mass atrocity-related deaths since 1900. A distinct empirical phenomenon, mass atrocities are events of enormous scale, severity, and brutality, occur in wartime and in peacetime, are geographically w...

How Effective Are Monetary Incentives to Vote? Evidence from a Nationwide Policy

By Mariella Gonzales, Gianmarco León-Ciliotta, and Luis R. Martínez

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2022

We study voters' response to marginal changes to the fine for electoral abstention in Peru, leveraging variation from a nationwide reform. A smaller fine has a robust, negative effect on voter turnout, partly through irregular changes in voter registratio...

Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836–2016

By Michael Geruso, Dean Spears, and Ishaana Talesara

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2022

Inversions—in which the popular vote winner loses the election—have occurred in four US presidential races. We show that rather than being statistical flukes, inversions have been ex ante likely since the early 1800s. In elections yielding a popular v...

The Political Impact of Immigration: Evidence from the United States

By Anna Maria Mayda, Giovanni Peri, and Walter Steingress

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2022

This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Rep...

Political Turnover, Bureaucratic Turnover, and the Quality of Public Services

By Mitra Akhtari, Diana Moreira, and Laura Trucco

American Economic Review, February 2022

We study how political turnover in mayoral elections in Brazil affects public service provision by local governments. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design for close elections, we find that municipalities with a new party in office experience uphea...

Taxes and Turnout: When the Decisive Voter Stays at Home

By Felix Bierbrauer, Aleh Tsyvinski, and Nicolas Werquin

American Economic Review, February 2022

We develop a model of political competition with endogenous turn-out and endogenous platforms. Parties trade off incentivizing their supporters to vote and discouraging the supporters of the competing party from voting. We show that the latter objective i...

School Spending and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Revenue Limit Elections in Wisconsin

By E. Jason Baron

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

This study examines the impacts of two distinct types of school spending on student outcomes. State-imposed revenue limits cap the total amount of revenue that a school district in Wisconsin can raise unless the district holds a referendum asking voters t...

Oil for What?-Illicit Iraqi Oil Contracts and the U.N. Security Council

By Paul Heaton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2005

The Oil-For-Food program was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 986 in 1995 as a means of providing humanitarian relief to Iraq, which had been under U.N. economic sanctions since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. After the invasion of ...