Mastering Panel Metrics: Causal Impact of Democracy on Growth

By Shuowen Chen, Victor Chernozhukov, and Iván Fernández-Val

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We revisit the panel data analysis of Acemoglu et al. (forthcoming) on the relationship between democracy and economic growth using state-of-the-art econometric methods. We argue that panel data settings are high-dimensional, resulting in estimators to be...

Disenfranchisement and Economic Inequality: Downstream Effects of Shelby County v. Holder

By Abhay P. Aneja and Carlos F. Avenancio-León

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is considered by many to be the most effective civil rights law ever passed. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down important provisions from the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. This paper first discusses how the ...

Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Ririn Purnamasari, and Matthew Wai-Poi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper investigates how elite capture affects the welfare gains from targeted government transfer programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and nonexperimental data on a variety of exist...

Democratic Values and Institutions

By Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

This paper builds a model of the two-way interaction between democratic values and institutions to bridge sociological research, focusing on values, with economics research, which studies strategic decisions. Some citizens hold values that make them prote...

The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World?

By Yuyu Chen and David Y. Yang

American Economic Review, June 2019

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored internet. We track subjects' media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, econom...

Do 40-Year-Old Facts Still Matter? Long-Run Effects of Federal Oversight under the Voting Rights Act

By Desmond Ang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act that mandated federal oversight of election laws in discriminatory jurisdictions, prompting a spate of controversial new voting rules. Utilizing difference-in-differences to examine the...

Capital Cities, Conflict, and Misgovernance

By Filipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do, and Bernardo Guimaraes

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2019

We investigate the links between capital cities, conflict, and the quality of governance, starting from the assumption that incumbent elites are constrained by the threat of insurrection, and that the latter is rendered less effective by distance from the...

The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV

By Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti, and Andrea Tesei

American Economic Review, July 2019

We study the political impact of commercial television in Italy exploiting the staggered introduction of Berlusconi's private TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals with early access to Mediaset all-entertainment content were m...

Laboratories of Democracy: Policy Experimentation under Decentralization

By Chen Cheng and Christopher Li

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2019

We develop a model of policy experimentation in which the policy decisions of local and national politicians are driven by career concerns. When politicians' payoffs are convex in their reputation and policymaking is opaque, local politicians experiment b...

Voter Response to Peak and End Transfers: Evidence from a Conditional Cash Transfer Experiment

By Sebastian Galiani, Nadya Hajj, Patrick J. McEwan, Pablo Ibarrarán, and Nandita Krishnaswamy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

In a Honduran field experiment, sequences of cash transfers to poor households varied in amount of the largest (peak) and last (end) transfers. Larger peak-end transfers increased voter turnout and the incumbent party's vote share in the 2013 presidential...

Optimal Dynamic Allocation of Attention

By Yeon-Koo Che and Konrad Mierendorff

American Economic Review, August 2019

We consider a decision maker (DM) who, before taking an action, seeks information by allocating her limited attention dynamically over different news sources that are biased toward alternative actions. Endogenous choice of information generates rich dynam...

Peer Effects in Legislative Voting

By Nikolaj Harmon, Raymond Fisman, and Emir Kamenica

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

We exploit seating rules in the European Parliament to identify peer effects in legislative voting. Sitting adjacently leads to a 7 percent reduction in the overall likelihood that two members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the same party differ i...

Leader Selection and Service Delivery in Community Groups: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By Erika Deserranno, Miri Stryjan, and Munshi Sulaiman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

In developing countries, NGOs and governments often rely on local groups for the delivery of financial and public services. This paper studies how the design of rules used for group leader selection affects leader identity and shapes service delivery. To ...

The Invisible Hand of the Government: Moral Suasion during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

By Steven Ongena, Alexander Popov, and Neeltje Van Horen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

Using proprietary data on banks' monthly securities holdings, we show that during the European sovereign debt crisis, domestic banks in fiscally stressed countries were considerably more likely than foreign banks to increase their holdings of domestic sov...

Did Austerity Cause Brexit?

By Thiemo Fetzer

American Economic Review, November 2019

This paper documents a significant association between the exposure of an individual or area to the UK government's austerity-induced welfare reforms begun in 2010, and the following: the subsequent rise in support for the UK Independence Party, an import...

Policy Evolution under the Clean Air Act

[Symposium: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Clean Air and Water Acts]

By Richard Schmalensee and Robert N. Stavins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

The US Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 with strong bipartisan support, was the first environmental law to give the federal government a serious regulatory role, established the architecture of the US air pollution control system, and became a model for su...

On Latin American Populism, and Its Echoes around the World

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Sebastian Edwards

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In this article, I discuss the ways in which populist experiments have evolved historically. Populists are charismatic leaders who use a fiery rhetoric to pitch the interests of "the people" against those of banks, large firms, multinational companies, ...

Informational Autocrats

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, "informational autocrats" artificially boost their popularity by c...

The Surge of Economic Nationalism in Western Europe

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

We document the surge of economic nationalist and radical-right parties in western Europe between the early 1990s and 2016. We discuss how economic shocks contribute to explaining this political shift, looking in turn at theory and evidence on the polit...

Economic Insecurity and the Causes of Populism, Reconsidered

[Symposium: Modern Populism]

By Yotam Margalit

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2019

Growing conventional wisdom holds that a chief driver of the populist vote is economic insecurity. I contend that this view overstates the role of economic insecurity as an explanation in several ways. First, it conflates the significance of economic in...