Political Distortions, State Capture, and Economic Development in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Nathan Canen and Leonard Wantchekon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural factors (e.g., pre-colonial and colonial institutions, or ethnic diversity) ma...

Misspecified Politics and the Recurrence of Populism

By Gilat Levy, Ronny Razin, and Alwyn Young

American Economic Review, March 2022

We develop a dynamic model of political competition between two groups that differ in their subjective model of the data generating process for a common outcome. One group has a simpler model than the other group as they ignore some relevant policy variab...

A Review of Robert Sugden's Community of Advantage

By Patrick Harless and Romans Pancs

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

In his book, The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist's Defence of the Market, Robert Sugden says that people should be left alone to do what they want. We interpret his reasons for saying so and try to unify them. The unification uses...

Religion and Discrimination: A Review Essay of Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom

By Sriya Iyer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama's book, Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom, examines the links between religion, state action, and the development of liberalism in medieval Europe. It discusses a model of "conditiona...

Addressing Absence

[Symposium: Public Sector Absenteeism]

By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

Absent providers are a major problem both for public health facilities and primary schools in many developing countries. For example, in India, absence rates for teachers are over 24 percent, and for health providers they are over 40 percent. This paper p...

Political Fragmentation and Government Stability: Evidence from Local Governments in Spain

By Felipe Carozzi, Davide Cipullo, and Luca Repetto

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022

This paper studies how political fragmentation affects government stability. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that each additional party with representation in the local parliament increases the probability that the incumbent government is...

Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experiments at International Debating Competitions

By Peter Schwardmann, Egon Tripodi, and Joël J. van der Weele

American Economic Review, April 2022

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position's factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits the potential of communication to resolve conflict and reduce polarizat...

Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the United States

By Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, April 2022

We measure the overall influence of contextual versus individual factors (e.g., voting rules and media as opposed to race and education) on voter behavior, and explore underlying mechanisms. Using a US-wide voter-level panel, 2008–2018, we examine voter...

Is the Partisan Divide Real? Polarization in Preferences for Redistribution

By Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

There is a widespread belief that Republicans and Democrats are worlds apart with respect to their preferences for redistribution. However, is that partisan divide real? In this paper, we discuss evidence from the General Social Survey and a tailored surv...

Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions

By Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We illustrate the design and use of open-ended survey questions to elicit people's first-order concerns on policies. Closed-ended questions are the backbone of surveys but may prime respondents to select some answers and may omit relevant options. Open-en...

Review of Grossman and Helpman's Special Interest Politics

By David P. Baron

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2002

In Special Interest Politics Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman examine how special-interest groups influence political outcomes for the benefit of their members. The authors take interest groups seriously by considering a range of theories and su...

Black Economists on Race and Policy: Contributions to Education, Poverty and Mobility, and Public Finance

By Dania V. Francis, Bradley L. Hardy, and Damon Jones

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

We explore the contributions of Black economists to research on major economic and social policy problems in the United States. We focus on applications in education, poverty and economic mobility, and public finance to extract common themes and patterns....

Historical Lynchings and the Contemporary Voting Behavior of Blacks

By Jhacova Williams

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper analyzes the extent to which the political participation of Blacks can be traced to historical lynchings that took place from 1882 to 1930. Using county-level voter registration data, I show that Blacks who reside in southern counties that expe...

Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States

By Timothy Besley and Anne Case

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2003

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. It reviews empirical evidence on the relationship betwe...

Term Limits and Bargaining Power in Electoral Competition

By Germán Gieczewski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

I study a dynamic model of electoral competition between candidates with heterogeneous valence. When the candidates' and voters' policy preferences differ, the winner extracts rents, limited only by the voters' threat of electing the weaker candidate. Thi...

Political Competition with Endogenous Party Formation and Citizen Activists

By Emanuel Hansen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

This paper studies the effects of endogenous party formation on political platforms. It develops a model in which parties allow like-minded citizens to, first, share the cost of running in a public election and, second, coordinate on a policy platform. Th...

Learning in Games and the Interpretation of Natural Experiments

By Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We show that the treatment effect estimated by standard methods such as regression discontinuity analysis or difference-in-differences may contain a transient "learning effect" that is entangled with the long-term effect of the treatment. This learning ef...

All Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity

By Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro

American Economic Review, August 2022

Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to e...

Political Parties Do Matter in US Cities . . . for Their Unfunded Pensions

By Christian Dippel

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

This paper studies public sector pension obligations, the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many US cities. Employing a regression discontinuity design around close elections, benefit payments out of a city's public sector pensions are shown to gr...

Checking and Sharing Alt-Facts

By Emeric Henry ⓡ Ekaterina Zhuravskaya ⓡ Sergei Guriev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

During the 2019 European elections campaign, we exposed a random sample of French voting-age Facebook users to false statements by a far-right populist party. A randomly selected subgroup was also presented with fact-checking of these statements; another ...