The Dynamics of Property Rights in Modern Autocracies

By Dan Cao and Roger Lagunoff

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We study a dynamic model of property appropriation in autocracies. To maintain the appearance of the rule of law, an autocrat reassigns property only when the reassignment is acceptable to all affected citizens. Nevertheless, the autocrat can appropriate ...

More than Words: Leaders' Speech and Risky Behavior during a Pandemic

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Tiago Cavalcanti, and Daniel Da Mata

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

This paper investigates whether the anti-scientific rhetoric of modern populists can induce followers to engage in risky behavior. We gather electoral information, credit card expenses, and geo-localized mobile phone data for approximately 60 million devi...

Immigrant Integration in the United States: The Role of Adult English Language Training

By Blake H. Heller and Kirsten Slungaard Mumma

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

The ability to speak and understand a host country's primary language is strongly associated with measures of immigrant integration. We estimate the causal effects of English language training for adult immigrants on participants' civic and economic outco...

Voting for Democracy: Chile's Plebiscito and the Electoral Participation of a Generation

By Ethan Kaplan, Fernando Saltiel, and Sergio Urzúa

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2023

This paper assesses the long-term consequences of voting for democracy. We study Chile's 1988 plebiscite, which ended 15 years of dictatorship and reestablished democracy. Taking advantage of individual-level voting data, we implement an age-based regress...

Second-Best Fairness: The Trade-off between False Positives and False Negatives

By Alexander W. Cappelen, Cornelius Cappelen, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, September 2023

A main focus in economics is how to design optimal policies in second-best situations, which often requires a trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and others less than they deserve, false negatives. This paper...

Machiavellian Privatization

By Bruno Biais and Enrico Perotti

American Economic Review, March 2002

We analyze politically motivated privatization in a bipartisan environment. When median-class voters a priori favor redistributive policies, a strategic privatization program allocating them enough shares can induce a voting shift away from left-wing part...

The Economic Origins of Government

By Robert C. Allen, Mattia C. Bertazzini, and Leander Heldring

American Economic Review, October 2023

We test between cooperative and extractive theories of the origins of government. We use river shifts in southern Iraq as a natural experiment, in a new archeological panel dataset. A shift away creates a local demand for a government to coordinate becaus...

Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates

By Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons, and Clemence Tricaud

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

Candidates' placements in polls and past elections can be powerful coordination devices for parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French two-round elections, we show that candidates who place first in the first round are more like...

How Cable News Reshaped Local Government

By Elliott Ash and Sergio Galletta

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

This paper shows that partisan cable news broadcasts have a causal effect on the size and composition of budgets in US localities. Using exogenous channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we show that exposure to the conservative Fox News chan...

A Model of Sequential Crisis Management

By Fei Li and Jidong Zhou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2023

We propose a model of how multiple societies respond to a common crisis. A government faces a "damned-either-way" policymaking dilemma: aggressive intervention contains the crisis, but the resulting good outcome makes people skeptical about the costly res...

Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Legislature

By S. Nageeb Ali, B. Douglas Bernheim, Alexander W. Bloedel, and Silvia Console Battilana

American Economic Review, November 2023

We model legislative decision-making with an agenda setter who can propose policies sequentially, tailoring each proposal to the status quo that prevails after prior votes. Voters are sophisticated, and the agenda setter cannot commit to future proposals....

Electoral Cycles in Macroprudential Regulation

By Karsten Müller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

Do politics matter for macroprudential policies? I show that changes in macroprudential regulation exhibit a predictable electoral cycle in the run-up to 221 elections across 58 countries from 2000 through 2014. Policies restricting mortgages and consumer...

Populist Leaders and the Economy

By Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch

American Economic Review, December 2023

Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25 percent of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new long-run cross-country database to study the macroeconomic history ...

The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the United States

By Filipe Campante, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, and Ruben Durante

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We study how public anxiety over the threat of a disease outbreak can affect voter behavior by looking at the Ebola scare that hit the United States in 2014. Exploiting timing and locations of the four cases diagnosed in the country, we show that heighten...

Constructive versus Toxic Argumentation in Debates

By Tymofiy Mylovanov and Andriy Zapechelnyuk

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2024

Two debaters address an audience by sequentially choosing their information strategies. We compare the setting where the second mover reveals additional information (constructive argumentation) with the setting where the second mover obfuscates the first ...

How Can Lower-Income Countries Collect More Taxes? The Role of Technology, Tax Agents, and Politics

[Symposium: Taxation and Developing Countries]

By Oyebola Okunogbe and Gabriel Tourek

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2024

Increasing tax revenues is a major policy goal in many low- and lower-middle-income countries. While economic growth is an important determinant of taxation, available evidence indicates that it does not automatically increase taxation. Rather, countrie...

Real Effects of Markets on Politics: Evidence from US Presidential Elections

By Alan D. Crane, Andrew Koch, and Leming Lin

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Despite the economic importance of the US stock market, there is strikingly little evidence of its impact on elections. Using county-level variation in stock market participation, we document the impact of market returns on election outcomes. High-partici...

Cash and Conflict: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from Niger

By Patrick Premand and Dominic Rohner

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

Conflict undermines development, while adverse economic shocks, in turn, can increase conflict risk. Policy interventions such as cash transfers could attenuate conflict risk by raising poor households' opportunity costs. However, cash transfers may also ...

The Political Effects of Immigration: Culture or Economics?

By Alberto Alesina and Marco Tabellini

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

We review the growing literature on the political economy of immigration. First, we discuss the effects of immigration on a wide range of political and social outcomes. The existing evidence suggests that immigrants often, but not always, trigger backlash...

The Employment Effects of Ethnic Politics

By Francesco Amodio, Giorgio Chiovelli, and Sebastian Hohmann

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2024

We study the labor market consequences of ethnic politics in African democracies. Using subnational georeferenced data from 15 countries from 1996 to 2017, we compare individuals from ethnicities linked to parties at the margin of electing a representativ...