Beyond Work Ethic: Religion, Individual, and Political Preferences

By Christoph Basten and Frank Betz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2013

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experime...

The Political Resource Curse

By Fernanda Brollo, Tommaso Nannicini, Roberto Perotti, and Guido Tabellini

American Economic Review, August 2013

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidate...

Why Hasn't Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?

[Symposium: The Top 1 Percent]

By Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

During the past two generations, democratic forms have coexisted with massive increases in economic inequality in the United States and many other advanced democracies. Moreover, these new inequalities have primarily benefited the top 1 percent and even...

Political Credit Cycles: The Case of the Eurozone

[Symposium: The Euro]

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Luis Garicano, and Tano Santos

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2013

We study the mechanisms through which the entry into the euro delayed, rather than advanced, key economic reforms in the eurozone periphery and led to the deterioration of important institutions in these countries. We show that the abandonment of the re...

Democracy and Reforms: Evidence from a New Dataset

By Paola Giuliano, Prachi Mishra, and Antonio Spilimbergo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2013

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the effect of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financia...

Employment, Wages, and Voter Turnout

By Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on pres...

Can Informed Public Deliberation Overcome Clientelism? Experimental Evidence from Benin

By Thomas Fujiwara and Leonard Wantchekon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

This paper studies the electoral effects of town hall meetings based on programmatic, nonclientelist platforms. The experiment involves the cooperation of leading candidates in a presidential election in Benin. A campaign strategy based solely on these...

Gifts of Mars: Warfare and Europe's Early Rise to Riches

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Western Europe surged ahead of the rest of the world long before technological growth became rapid. Europe in 1500 already had incomes twice as high on a per capita basis as Africa, and one-third greater than most of Asia. In this essay, we explain how ...

Social Ideology and Taxes in a Differentiated Candidates Framework

By Stefan Krasa and Mattias Polborn

American Economic Review, January 2014

Many observers argue that political polarization, particularly on social and cultural issues, has increased in the United States. How does this influence the political competition on economic issues? We analyze this question using a framework in which ...

On the Political Economy of Urban Growth: Homeownership versus Affordability

By François Ortalo-Magné and Andrea Prat

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

We study the equilibrium properties of an overlapping-generation economy where agents choose where to locate and how much housing to own, and city residents vote on the number of new building permits every period. Undersupply of housing persists in equil...

Coalition Formation in a Legislative Voting Game

By Nels Christiansen, Sotiris Georganas, and John H. Kagel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2014

We experimentally investigate the Jackson and Moselle (2002) model where legislators bargain over policy proposals and the allocation of private goods. Key comparative static predictions of the model hold with the introduction of private goods, including...

Income and Democracy: Comment

By Matteo Cervellati, Florian Jung, Uwe Sunde, and Thomas Vischer

American Economic Review, February 2014

Acemoglu et al. (2008) document that the correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears when including time and country fixed effects. While their results are robust for the full sample, we find evidence for significant but heterogeneou...

When Ideas Trump Interests: Preferences, Worldviews, and Policy Innovations

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

Ideas are strangely absent from modern models of political economy. In most prevailing theories of policy choice, the dominant role is instead played by "vested interests"—elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of ...

Resolving Debt Overhang: Political Constraints in the Aftermath of Financial Crises

By Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

Countries become more politically polarized and fractionalized following financial crises, reducing the likelihood of major financial reforms precisely when they might have especially large benefits. The evidence from a large sample of countries provides...

Free Trade Agreements and the Consolidation of Democracy

By Xuepeng Liu and Emanuel Ornelas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2014

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, ...

The Role of Local Officials in New Democracies: Evidence from Indonesia

By Monica Martinez-Bravo

American Economic Review, April 2014

This paper shows that the body of appointed officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of electoral fraud and clientelistic spending in new democracies. I develop a model that predicts that appoi...

Cycles of Conflict: An Economic Model

By Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky

American Economic Review, April 2014

We propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions. G...

Candidates, Character, and Corruption

By B. Douglas Bernheim and Navin Kartik

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2014

We study the characteristics of self-selected candidates in corrupt political systems. Individuals differ along two dimensions of unobservable character: public spirit (altruism) and honesty (disutility from selling out to special interests). Both aspe...

Health and the Political Agency of Women

By Sonia Bhalotra and Irma Clots-Figueras

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2014

We investigate whether women's political representation in state legislatures improves public provision of antenatal and childhood health services in the districts from which they are elected, arguing that the costs of poor services in this domain fall...

Political Campaigns and Big Data

[Symposium: Big Data]

By David W. Nickerson and Todd Rogers

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2014

Modern campaigns develop databases of detailed information about citizens to inform electoral strategy and to guide tactical efforts. Despite sensational reports about the value of individual consumer data, the most valuable information campaigns acquire ...