When Individual Politics Become Public: Do Civil Service Protections Insulate Government Workers?

By Morgan Foy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

This paper examines whether the civil service system protected state bureaucrats from political interference following a recall petition against the governor of Wisconsin. I find that most classified workers, who were covered by the state civil service la...

Public Information Is an Incentive for Politicians: Experimental Evidence from Delhi Elections

By Abhijit Banerjee, Nils Enevoldsen, Rohini Pande, and Michael Walton

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

Two years prior to elections, two-thirds of Delhi municipal councillors learned they had been randomly chosen for a preelection newspaper report card. Treated councillors in high-slum areas increased pro-poor spending, relative both to control counterpart...

The Wage Gap and Public Support for Social Security

By Assaf Razin, Efraim Sadka, and Phillip Swagel

American Economic Review, May 2002

Public Debt and the Political Economy of Reforms

By Pierre C. Boyer, Brian Roberson, and Christoph Esslinger

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2024

How do electoral incentives influence the choice to experiment with a policy reform that generates uncertain future benefits? To answer this question, we examine a two-period model of redistributive politics with uncertain policy outcomes involving a mixt...

Monotone Function Intervals: Theory and Applications

By Kai Hao Yang and Alexander K. Zentefis

American Economic Review, August 2024

A monotone function interval is the set of monotone functions that lie pointwise between two fixed monotone functions. We characterize the set of extreme points of monotone function intervals and apply this to a number of economic settings. First, we leve...

Firm Donations and Political Rhetoric: Evidence from a National Ban

By Julia Cagé, Caroline Le Pennec, and Elisa Mougin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

We study France's 1995 ban on firm donations to politicians. We use a difference-in-differences approach and a novel dataset combining the campaign manifestos issued by candidates running in French parliamentary elections with data on their campaign contr...

Government Transfers and Votes for State Intervention

By Giuseppe Albanese, Guido de Blasio, and Lorenzo Incoronato

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2024

Government transfers might have long-lasting consequences on electoral outcomes. We study a regional policy implemented in Italy over the second half of the twentieth century and leverage variation in transfers to show that parties promoting more state in...

Sweeping Changes and an Uncertain Legacy: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017

[Symposium: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017]

By William G. Gale, Jeffrey L. Hoopes, and Kyle Pomerleau

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2024

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 introduced sweeping changes to individual and corporate taxation. We summarize the major provisions, trace the origins of the Act, and compare it to previous tax changes. We also examine the effects on the govern...

Valuing Long-Term Property Rights with Anticipated Political Regime Shifts

By Zhiguo He, Maggie Hu, Zhenping Wang, and Vincent Yao

American Economic Review, September 2024

We identify exposure to political risk by exploiting a unique variation around land lease extension protection after 2047 in Hong Kong's housing market due to historical arrangements. Relative to properties that have been promised an extension protection,...

Repression and Repertoires

By Stephen Morris and Mehdi Shadmehr

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

We formalize Tilly's concept of repertoires of collective action and analyze how state repression affects the variety of observed contentious actions. When repression accelerates with higher levels of antiregime actions (convex repression structure), oppo...

France after 1789: Essay on Elster's France before 1789

By Antoine Parent

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2024

In this essay on Elster's book (2020), I expose my concerns about the ability of behavioral tools to correctly address the transition phase between the absolutist regime and the democratic institutions inherited from the French Revolution. Rehabilitating ...

The Price of Power: Costs of Political Corruption in Indian Electricity

By Meera Mahadevan

American Economic Review, October 2024

Politicians may target public goods to benefit their constituents, at the expense of others. I study corruption in the context of Indian electricity and estimate the welfare consequences. Using new administrative billing data and close-election regression...

International Friends and Enemies

By Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu, and Stephen J. Redding

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2024

We examine whether, as countries become more economically dependent on a trade partner, they realign politically toward that trade partner. We use network measures of economic exposure to foreign productivity growth derived from the class of trade models ...

The Status Quo and Belief Polarization of Inattentive Agents: Theory and Experiment

By Vladimír Novák, Andrei Matveenko, and Silvio Ravaioli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2024

We show that rational but inattentive agents can become polarized ex ante. We present how optimal information acquisition and subsequent belief formation depend crucially on the agent-specific status quo valuation. Beliefs can systematically—in expectat...

Corrupted Votes and Rule Compliance

By Arno Apffelstaedt ⓡ Jana Freundt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2024

Allegations of voter fraud accompany many real-world elections. How does electoral malpractice affect the acceptance of elected institutions? Using an online experiment in which participants distribute income according to majority-elected rules, we show t...

Polity Size and Local Government Performance: Evidence from India

By Veda Narasimhan and Jeffrey Weaver

American Economic Review, November 2024

Developing countries have increasingly decentralized power to local governments. This paper studies the implications of a central element of decentralization (polity size) using population-based discontinuities that determine local government boundaries f...

Sticky Spending, Sequestration, and Government Debt

By Facundo Piguillem and Alessandro Riboni

American Economic Review, November 2024

Once established, government spending programs tend to continue. A commonly held view is that spending inertia leads to unsustainable debt, ultimately requiring fiscal adjustments such as "sequestration." We show that by insuring against political turnove...

The Political Economy of Industrial Policy

[Symposium: Industrial Policy]

By Réka Juhász and Nathan Lane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2024

We examine the ways in which political realities shape industrial policy through the lens of modern political economy. We consider two broad "governance constraints": (1) the political forces that shape how industrial policy is chosen and (2) the ways in ...

Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

By Luca Braghieri

American Economic Review, December 2024

A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This pa...

The Economics of Social Media

By Guy Aridor, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Ro'ee Levy, and Lena Song

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

We provide a guide to the burgeoning literature on the economics of social media. We first define social media platforms and highlight their unique features. We then synthesize the main lessons from the empirical economics literature and organize them aro...