The Franchise, Policing, and Race: Evidence from Arrests Data and the Voting Rights Act

By Giovanni Facchini, Brian Knight, and Cecilia Testa

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2025

This paper investigates the relationship between the franchise and policing. We find that, following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black arrest rates in counties that both had more newly enfranchised Blacks and were covered by the legislation fell, compa...

Politics at Work

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Valdemar Pinho Neto, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, October 2025

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes using new microdata from Brazil. We first show that business owners are considerably more likely to employ copartisan workers. This phenomenon is in part driven by the o...

Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation: Comment

By Theo Eicher and Thomas Osang

American Economic Review, December 2002

Optimal Voting Mechanisms on Generalized Single-Peaked Domains

By Tobias Rachidi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

This paper studies the design of voting mechanisms. There are multiple alternatives, and the voters have generalized single-peaked preferences derived from median spaces as introduced in Nehring and Puppe (2007b). This class of preferences covers a wide r...

Do Tuition Subsidies Raise Political Participation?

By Daniel Firoozi and Igor Geyn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Civic externalities motivate education expenditures, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applications and a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate how a tuition-free c...

The Survival of the Welfare State

By John Hassler, José V. Rodríguez Mora, Kjetil Storesletten, and Fabrizio Zilibotti

American Economic Review, March 2003

This paper provides an analytical characterization of Markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting, where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution. A key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends p...

Sequential Sampling by Individuals and Groups: An Experimental Study

By Pëllumb Reshidi, Alessandro Lizzeri, Leeat Yariv, Jimmy Chan, and Wing Suen

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such dynamic information-collection processes, as in sequential hypothesis testin...

Web Search Personalization during the US 2020 Election

By Ulrich Matter and Roland Hodler

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2025

We study the impact of web search personalization on ideological segregation in search results. We deploy 150 synthetic internet users with randomized partisan browsing preferences across 25 US cities. These users are active during the US 2020 election an...

Strategic Voting in Two-Party Legislative Elections

By Niall Hughes

American Economic Review, December 2025

I study multidistrict legislative elections with two parties and two binary dimensions of policy. Strategic voters focus on the dimension where their district is most likely to be pivotal in the legislature. Anticipating this, candidates select different ...

Corporate Lobbying and Commitment Failure in Capital Taxation

By Nicolas Marceau and Michael Smart

American Economic Review, March 2003

Redistributive Promises and the Adoption of Economic Reform

By Sanjay Jain and Sharun W. Mukand

American Economic Review, March 2003

Highway to Hitler

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2026

We show that the building of the Autobahn network in Nazi Germany boosted popular support for Adolf Hitler, helping to entrench the Nazi dictatorship. Direct local economic benefits are unlikely to explain the effect. Instead, it reflects successful propa...

Divine Policy: The Impact of Religion in Government

By Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, Alessandro Pizzigolotto, and Lena Lindbjerg Sperling

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2026

Can policies shape personal values and beliefs? To examine, we exploit the staggered introduction of faith-based initiatives across US states. Our difference-in-differences analysis reveals that the initiatives strengthened religiosity and conservative-re...

Speed Limit Policies: The Output Gap and Optimal Monetary Policy

By Carl Walsh

American Economic Review, March 2003

Power, Property Rights, and the Dynamics of Local Wealth Appropriation

By Dan Cao, Roger Lagunoff, and Yingqi Xu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2026

We examine the dynamic connections between local wealth inequality and the local politics of property rights. A jurisdiction comprises a politically dominant in-group and a marginalized out-group. At each date, the jurisdiction exploits weaknesses in due ...

Cross-State Strategic Voting

By Gordon B. Dahl, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, and William Mullins

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We estimate that 3.1 percent of US voters, or 6.1 million individuals, were registered to vote in two states in 2020, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote. Double registrants are concentrated in the wealthiest zip codes and respond ...

Plata y Plomo: How Higher Wages Expose Politicians to Criminal Violence

By Massimo Pulejo and Pablo Querubín

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

What is the effect of politicians' wages on corruption in the presence of criminal groups that use both bribes and violence? With a regression discontinuity design and three distinct proxies for corruption, we show that better-paid Italian politicians are...

Polling Place Location and the Costs of Voting

By Gaurav Bagwe ⓡ Juan Margitic ⓡ Allison Stashko

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We study how distance to one's polling place affects the likelihood of voting using a geographic regression discontinuity design with data from Pennsylvania and Georgia. A one-mile increase in distance to the polling place reduces the likelihood of voting...

Connections during Democratic Transitions: Insights from the Political Purge in Post-WWII France

By Toke S. Aidt, Jean Lacroix, and Pierre-Guillaume Méon

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2026

We examine how connections shaped transitional justice during France's post-WWII democratic transition. Parliamentarians who had supported the Vichy regime faced a two-stage purge process involving two courts. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, w...

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences

By Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, March 2026

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking: the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy ...