Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process

By Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Review, December 2014

Do lobbyists provide issue-specific information to members of Congress? Or do they provide special interests access to politicians? We present evidence to assess the role of issue expertise versus connections in the US Federal lobbying process and illus...

Present Bias and Collective Dynamic Choice in the Lab

By Matthew O. Jackson and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Review, December 2014

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, utilitarian aggregation necessitates a present bias. In lab experiments three quarters of "soci...

How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign

By Chad Kendall, Tommaso Nannicini, and Francesco Trebbi

American Economic Review, January 2015

In a large-scale controlled trial in collaboration with the reelection campaign of an Italian incumbent mayor, we administered (randomized) messages about the candidate's valence or ideology. Informational treatments affected both actual votes in the prec...

Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

By Michael Callen and James D. Long

American Economic Review, January 2015

We investigate the relationship between political networks, weak institutions, and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan combining: (i) data on political connections between candidates and election officials; (ii) a nationwi...

Information and Extremism in Elections

By Raphael Boleslavsky and Christopher Cotton

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We model an election in which parties nominate candidates with observable policy preferences prior to a campaign that produces information about candidate quality, a characteristic independent of policy. Informative campaigns lead to greater differentiati...

Mobility and Conflict

By Sourav Bhattacharya, Joyee Deb, and Tapas Kundu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2015

We study the role of intergroup mobility in the emergence of conflict. Two groups compete for the right to allocate society's resources. We allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, which the opposition can accept or re...

The Effects of Voting Costs on the Democratic Process and Public Finances

By Roland Hodler, Simon Luechinger, and Alois Stutzer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2015

Increasing the attractiveness of voting is often seen as a remedy for unequal participation and the influence of special-interest groups on public policy. However, lower voting costs may also bring less informed citizens to the poll, thereby inviting effo...

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

By Pietro Ortoleva and Erik Snowberg

American Economic Review, February 2015

This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political behavior. Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger partisan ide...

The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue...

Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Thomas Piketty

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

When a lengthy book is widely discussed in academic circles and the popular media, it is probably inevitable that the arguments of the book will be simplified in the telling and retelling. In the case of my book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

The Virtues of Hesitation: Optimal Timing in a Non-stationary World

By Urmee Khan and Maxwell B. Stinchcombe

American Economic Review, March 2015

In many economic, political, and social situations, circumstances change at random points in time, reacting is costly, and reactions appropriate to present circumstances may become inappropriate upon future changes, requiring further costly reaction. Wait...

Jon Elster's Securities against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, Elections: A Review Essay

By David Austen-Smith

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

The standard economic approach to designing institutions for collective decision making recognizes individuals' strategically rational motivations for misrepresentation and asks how best, given an objective function, to design a set of incentives and cons...

The Science, Economics, and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Review of The Climate Casino by William Nordhaus

By Adam B. Jaffe and Suzi Kerr

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2015

The problem of global climate change presents overwhelming factual, analytical, and normative challenges. Nordhaus surveys this terrain bravely and mostly successfully. He explains the scientific/economic consensus that the planet is warming, that people ...

How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments

By Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva

American Economic Review, April 2015

We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on US income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality...

Correlation Neglect, Voting Behavior, and Information Aggregation

By Gilat Levy and Ronny Razin

American Economic Review, April 2015

In this paper we analyze elections when voters underestimate the correlation between their information sources ("correlation neglect"). We find that this cognitive bias can improve political outcomes. We show that the extreme beliefs which result from cor...

Competitive Policy Development

By Alexander V. Hirsch and Kenneth W. Shotts

American Economic Review, April 2015

We present a model of policy development in which competing factions have different ideologies, yet agree on certain common objectives. Policy developers can appeal to a decision maker by making productive investments to improve the quality of their propo...

State Censorship

By Mehdi Shadmehr and Dan Bernhardt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2015

We characterize a ruler's decision of whether to censor media reports that convey information to citizens who decide whether to revolt. We find: (i) a ruler gains (his ex ante expected payoff increases) by committing to censoring slightly less than he doe...

Telecracy: Testing for Channels of Persuasion

By Guglielmo Barone, Francesco D'Acunto, and Gaia Narciso

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

We consider the long-lived slant towards Berlusconi in political information on Italian television (TV). We exploit a shock to the slanted exposure of viewers: idiosyncratic deadlines to switch to digital TV from 2008 to 2012, which increased the number o...

Legal, Political, and Institutional Constraints on the Financial Crisis Policy Response

[Symposium: The Bailouts of 2007-2009]

By Phillip Swagel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

As the financial crisis manifested itself and peaked in 2007 and 2008, the response of US policymakers and regulators was shaped in important ways by legal and political constraints. Policymakers lacked certain legal authorities that would have been usefu...

Understanding the Increase in Disability Insurance Benefit Receipt in the United States

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By Jeffrey B. Liebman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The share of working-age Americans receiving disability benefits from the federal Disability Insurance (DI) program has increased significantly in recent decades, from 2.2 percent in the late 1970s to 3.6 percent in the years immediately preceding the 200...