Estimating Dynamic Games of Electoral Competition to Evaluate Term Limits in US Gubernatorial Elections

By Holger Sieg and Chamna Yoon

American Economic Review, July 2017

This paper shows how to identify and estimate, using standard semi-parametric techniques, a class of dynamic games with perfect monitoring, that have been at the frontier of recent research in political economy. The empirical analysis provides novel quant...

Towards a Political Theory of the Firm

[Symposium: The Modern Corporation]

By Luigi Zingales

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2017

The revenues of large companies often rival those of national governments, and some companies have annual revenues higher than many national governments. Among the largest corporations in 2015, some had private security forces that rivaled the best secret...

Collective Self-Control

By Alessandro Lizzeri and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2017

Behavioral economics presents a "paternalistic" rationale for a benevolent government's intervention. We consider an economy where the only "distortion" is agents' time-inconsistency. We study the desirability of various forms of collective action, ones p...

Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

By Timothy Besley, Olle Folke, Torsten Persson, and Johanna Rickne

American Economic Review, August 2017

We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in S...

Tenure in Office and Public Procurement

By Decio Coviello and Stefano Gagliarducci

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We study the impact of politicians' tenure in office on the outcomes of public procurement using a dataset on Italian municipal governments. To identify a causal relation, we first compare elections where the incumbent mayor barely won or barely lost anot...

Mafia in the Ballot Box

By Giuseppe De Feo and Giacomo Davide De Luca

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

We study the impact of organized crime on electoral results, analyzing in detail the national parliamentary elections in Sicily for the period 1946-1992. We document the significant support given by the Sicilian mafia to the Christian Democratic Party whe...

Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization

By Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu

American Economic Review, September 2017

We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, ...

Policy Uncertainty, Trade, and Welfare: Theory and Evidence for China and the United States

By Kyle Handley and Nuno Limão

American Economic Review, September 2017

We examine the impact of policy uncertainty on trade, prices, and real income through firm entry investments in general equilibrium. We estimate and quantify the impact of trade policy on China's export boom to the United States following its 2001 WTO acc...

The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness

By John Duggan and César Martinelli

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2017

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We define stationary electoral equilibrium, which encompasses notions used by Barro (1...

One Mandarin Benefits the Whole Clan: Hometown Favoritism in an Authoritarian Regime

By Quoc-Anh Do, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, and Anh N. Tran

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2017

We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive panel of ranking officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions' impact on infrastructure in their hometowns of patrilineal ancestry. Native officials' promotions lead to ...

Competing for Loyalty: The Dynamics of Rallying Support

By Matias Iaryczower and Santiago Oliveros

American Economic Review, October 2017

We consider a class of dynamic collective action problems in which either a single principal or two competing principals vie for the support of members of a group. We focus on the dynamic problem that emerges when agents negotiate and commit their support...

Politician Family Networks and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from the Philippines

By Cesi Cruz, Julien Labonne, and Pablo Querubín

American Economic Review, October 2017

We demonstrate the importance of politician social networks for electoral outcomes. Using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages in the Philippines, we show that candidates for public office are disproporti...

Comparing Voting by Committees According to Their Manipulability

By R. Pablo Arribillaga and Jordi Massó

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

We consider the class of voting by committees to be used by a society to collectively choose a subset from a given set of objects. We offer a simple criterion to compare two voting by committees without dummy agents according to their manipulability. This...

Ideology as Opinion: A Spatial Model of Common-Value Elections

By Joseph McMurray

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

Spatial election literature attributes voters' political differences to irreconcilable conflicts of interest. Alternatively, voters may merely hold differing beliefs regarding which policies best promote the public interest, as in the classic common-value...

Centralized Decision Making and Informed Lobbying

By Rafael Costa Lima, Humberto Moreira, and Thierry Verdier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2017

We address the trade-off between centralized and decentralized decision making subject to influence from privately informed lobbies. We focus on informative equilibria with separating differentiable contribution schedules and identify an information trans...

Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration

By Thomas Sampson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on its membership in the European Union. Although most of Britain's establishment backed remaining in the European Union, 52 percent of voters disagreed and handed a surprise victory to the "leave" ...

Ideology, Economic Policy, and Economic History: Cohen and DeLong's Concrete Economics

By Alexander J. Field

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2017

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire in...

Together We Will: Experimental Evidence on Female Voting Behavior in Pakistan

By Xavier Giné and Ghazala Mansuri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

In many emerging democracies women are less likely to vote than men and, when they do vote, are likely to follow the wishes of male household and clan heads. We assess the impact of a voter awareness campaign on female turnout, candidate choice and party ...

The Possibility of Ideological Bias in Structural Macroeconomic Models

By Gilles Saint-Paul

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

An ideologically biased expert faces trade-offs in model design. The perceived model must be autocoherent—its use by all agents delivers a self-confirming equilibrium. Policy may be influenced by manipulating the Keynesian multiplier or the Phillips...

Intergenerational Mobility and Preferences for Redistribution

By Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, February 2018

Using new cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Americans are more optimistic than...