Why Voting? A Welfare Analysis

By Moritz Drexl and Andreas Kleiner

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2018

This article studies costly signaling. The signaling effort is chosen in multiple periods and observed with noise. The signaler benefits from the belief of the market, not directly from the effort or the signal. Optimal signaling behavior in time-varying ...

Does the Election of a Female Leader Clear the Way for More Women in Politics?

By Thushyanthan Baskaran and Zohal Hessami

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

Women remain underrepresented in politics and it remains unclear how this might change. In this paper, we investigate whether female council candidates receive more preferential votes when a female mayor has been recently elected into office. We hand coll...

Trickle-Down Ethnic Politics: Drunk and Absent in the Kenya Police Force (1957-1970)

By Oliver Vanden Eynde, Patrick M. Kuhn, and Alexander Moradi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

How does ethnic politics affect the state's ability to provide policing services? Using a panel of administrative personnel data on the full careers of 6,784 police officers, we show how the rise of ethnic politics around Kenya's independence influenced p...

Media Bias in China

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, and Yanhui Wu

American Economic Review, September 2018

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial cont...

Does Electoral Competition Curb Party Favoritism?

By Marta Curto-Grau, Albert Solé-Ollé, and Pilar Sorribas-Navarro

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co-partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about reelection. We draw on data on capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to loca...

Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate

By Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington

American Economic Review, October 2018

A long-standing debate in political economy is whether voters are driven primarily by economic self-interest or by less pecuniary motives like ethnocentrism. Using newly available data, we reexamine one of the largest partisan shifts in a modern democracy...

Evaluating Strategic Forecasters

By Rahul Deb, Mallesh M. Pai, and Maher Said

American Economic Review, October 2018

Motivated by the question of how one should evaluate professional election forecasters, we study a novel dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. A principal who wishes to hire only high-quality forecasters is faced with an agent of unknown qua...

The Effect of Consumer Sentiment on Consumption: Cross-Sectional Evidence from Elections

By Christian Gillitzer and Nalini Prasad

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

We seek to identify the causal effect of sentiment innovations on consumption. Using unique Australian consumer sentiment survey data we show that, immediately after elections with a change of government, supporters of the winning party report substantial...

A Theory of Organizational Dynamics: Internal Politics and Efficiency

By Hongbin Cai, Hong Feng, and Xi Weng

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

We consider a three-member organization in which one member retires in each period and the incumbent members vote to admit a candidate to fill the vacancy. Candidates differ in quality and belong to one of two types, and majority-type members share the to...

Political Kludges

By Keiichi Kawai, Ruitian Lang, and Hongyi Li

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

This paper explores the origins of policy complexity. It studies a model where policy is difficult to undo because policy elements are entangled with each other. Policy complexity may accumulate as successive policymakers layer new rules upon existing pol...

Majority Choice of an Income-Targeted Educational Voucher

By Dennis Epple, Richard Romano, and Sinan Sarpça

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2018

A model of majority choice of voucher characteristics with quantitative counterpart explains observed income eligibility requirements for educational vouchers. Households differ by income and preference for religious schooling. They elect a policy maker w...

The Logic of Insurgent Electoral Violence

By Luke N. Condra, James D. Long, Andrew C. Shaver, and Austin L. Wright

American Economic Review, November 2018

Competitive elections are essential to establishing the political legitimacy of democratizing regimes. We argue that insurgents undermine the state's mandate through electoral violence. We study insurgent violence during elections using newly declassified...

Fleeing a Lame Duck: Policy Uncertainty and Manufacturing Investment in US States

By Nathan Falk and Cameron A. Shelton

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

It is found that electorally-induced policy uncertainty decreases manufacturing investment in US states. In a state with average partisan polarization, the elasticity of election-year investment to a specific measure of policy uncertainty is -0.027. When ...

Is This Tax Reform, or Just Confusion?

[Symposium: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act]

By Joel Slemrod

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2018

Based on the experience of recent decades, the United States apparently musters the political will to change its tax system comprehensively about every 30 years, so it seems especially important to get it right when the chance arises. Based on the strong ...

The Sound of Silence: A Review Essay of Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

By Jean-Baptiste Fleury and Alain Marciano

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

This essay reviews Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, which triggered a huge controversy that virally spread on the internet and in various journals. We will evaluate MacLean's...

Impressionable Voters

By Costel Andonie and Daniel Diermeier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2019

We propose a model of impressionable voters. Impressionable voters vote based on impressions rather than maximizing expected utility. We apply our model to elections with multiple candidates and solve for the stationary distributions of the implied stocha...

Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions

By Alma Cohen and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-app...

Stimulating the Vote: ARRA Road Spending and Vote Share

By Emiliano Huet-Vaughn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper estimates the impact of public good spending on voting behavior in the United States, using a quasi-experimental design and the distribution of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) road projects in New Jersey. I find an approximate 1.5...

Gorbachev versus Deng: A Review of Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy

By Sergei Guriev

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2019

Chris Miller's book is a historian's account of Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to save the Soviet economy. Miller focuses on the question of why Gorbachev did not follow Deng Xiaoping and did not manage to reform the economy. Miller argues that it was not ...

Rising Government Debt: Causes and Solutions for a Decades-Old Trend

[Symposium: Fiscal Policy]

By Pierre Yared

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

Over the past four decades, government debt as a fraction of GDP has been on an upward trajectory in advanced economies, approaching levels not reached since World War II. While normative macroeconomic theories can explain the increase in the level of d...