The expansion of wind power has the potential to make a major contribution to the mitigation of climate change. While wind power generates positive externalities at the global level by reducing carbon dioxide, it also generates negative externalities at the local level, such as noise pollution...

For the past three years, Ukraine has not allowed Russia to win its illegal war of aggression. During long periods of the war, the parties have found themselves in a military and diplomatic stalemate. Now US President Donald Trump has sided with the aggressor. "Nothing about Ukraine without...

Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch (2023) investigate the impact of populist leaders on GDP growth in 60 countries. They build an original dataset identifying populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020. They then examine changes in countries' GDP growth rates following a populist...

Oliver Röpke was elected President of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) on 26 April 2023. At that time, President Röpke presented his political Manifesto for the period 2023-2025, highlighting the key priorities for his presidency. The Manifesto set forth an ambitious agenda of...

For governments, the occurrence of natural disasters creates the opportunity to demonstrate their willingness and competence in providing prompt and efficient disaster aid. A number of studies has investigated the political consequences of providing disaster aid by analyzing the effects of such...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of Donald Trump's campaign for coal during his successful race for the White House in 2016. We use a twofold empirical strategy. First, we estimate an event study model to show the change in Republican Party shares in coal counties in 2016 relative to...

Zhang (2023) used an online, pre-registered, large-scale controlled experiment to test the effect of an endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature on several perceptual and behavioural outcomes. The main results of the paper were the following: the endorsement of Biden caused a...

We computationally reproduce the central findings in Mehmood (2022), which studied the effect of a 2010 reform in Pakistan replacing the presidential appointment of high-court judges with peer appointments. Mehmood leveraged judicial records interpreted and coded by lawyers in Pakistan at the...

A second presidential term for Donald Trump would undoubtedly have huge impacts on topics in all areas of international relations - topics that are intrinsically relevant to all actors due to the status of the United States as a world power. Trump's political agenda differs considerably from...

The 2024 US presidential election will determine who will work with Congress to address three major fiscal issues: the expiration of key tax reforms from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the ongoing trade war with China, and the trajectory of the federal debt Vice President Kamala Harris...

If she is elected president, Kamala Harris is likely to continue President Joseph Biden's foreign policy, though her tone on the Middle East may differ somewhat from his Just as Biden continued much of former President Donald Trump's foreign policy, a re-elected Trump is likely to continue much...

Oliver Röpke was elected President of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) on 26 April 2023. At that time, President Röpke presented his political Manifesto for the period 2023-2025, highlighting the key priorities for his presidency. The Manifesto set forth an ambitious agenda of...

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in...

U.S. presidential approval is a topic that has long attracted the interest of political pundits, journalists, candidates and voters. Academic studies of presidential approval have been dominated by political scientists while economists have focused on the president’s political party and...

U.S. presidential approval is a topic that has long attracted the interest of political pundits, journalists, candidates and voters. Academic studies of presidential approval have been dominated by political scientists while economists have focused on the president’s political party and...

The Republican Party has been the party most supportive of free trade in American politics for half a century. Donald Trump, the 45th US president, held a different stance from his party on free trade. We assess how Trump's China tariffs in mid-2018 impacted the performance of his party in its...

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in...

Ideological spillovers refer to the modification of an individual’s core beliefs after learning about other people's beliefs. We study one specific international ideological spillover, namely, the effect of the unexpected election of a United States (US) president (Donald Trump on the 9th of...

Ideological spillovers refer to the modification of an individual's core beliefs after learning about other people's beliefs. We study one specific international ideological spillover, namely, the effect of the unexpected election of a United States (US) president (Donald Trump on the 9th of...

Purpose - This study attempts to figure out the factors that contributed to deposing certain elected presidents before the end of their constitutional terms, alongside tracing the new political context that prevailed in Latin America since 1978 and its impact on direct political participation...

One year ago, when Joe Biden first assumed office, America was a very different place. Since his election, our country has made one final stride in a cultural shift it still appears unaware of. Without accepting the foundational impacts addressed in this work soon, a medieval politics never...

A large literature in public economics seeks to answer whether government activity crowds out charitable donations. The empirical evidence is mixed, however, and prior estimates range from large crowding out effects to small crowding in effects. To resolve this inconsistency, we consider that...

In the space of just nine months, Tunisia's President Kais Saied has centralised power and dismantled the institutions established by the young democracy since the revolution of 2011. His new constitution establishing a "New Republic" will be put to a referendum on 25 July 2022. Saied’s plans...

It is possible that the May 2022 Philippine national elections will need to be conducted under pandemic conditions, so the country must prepare at the earliest possible time. International experience suggests it is possible to hold successful elections even with the risks posed by COVID-19, and...

With their joint announcement about the desire to resume peace talks, Colombia’s new president and the country’s second-largest guerrilla group, the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional), have sent a clear political signal. The pacification of the ELN is to take place under the aegis of a...

In this paper we investigate the effect of Donald Trump's campaign for coal in his successful race for the White House in 2016. Using a spatial Durbin model we estimate the effect of coal production on the Republicans vote share in the US Presidential Election of 2016 on the county level. To...

The events of September 11 2001, in which AI-Qaeda hijacked four planes and crashed them into the twin towers of World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the open fields of Pennsylvania killing thousands of Americans have invariably accelerated the Foreign policy objectives of the United States....

We argue that low levels of social capital are conducive to the electoral success of populist movements. Using a variety of data sources for the 2016 US Presidential election at the county and individual levels, we show that social capital, measured either by the density of memberships in civic,...

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has consolidated his authoritarian regime in recent years. This has been accompanied by a significant increase in Cairo’s foreign debt, which more than tripled between June 2013 and March 2022. The country’s debt policy was directly linked to the...

We create a novel reign-level dataset for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state-level outcomes. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts...

US Presidents have long issued presidential directives to federal agencies to adopt and implement programs to advance presidential priorities, both pursuant to statutes passed by Congress and outside of them. Federal courts from the first presidency established their power of judicial review of...

We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers governing large territories, where administrative power needs to be delegated to local elites. We describe how economic change can motivate rulers to empower different elites and emphasize the interaction...

Donald Trump ignored numerous governance norms in his one term as U.S. President, especially those that prescribe disclosure of official and personal financial information. His brief period of illness from COVID-19, which he broadcast to the world via his Twitter account, revealed the complexity...

In a Decision dated 8 January 2020, the ad hoc Committee in Víctor Pey Casado and President Allende Foundation v Republic of Chile decided in favour of the Respondent by declining to annul a 2016 Award—the second in the dispute. The decision is remarkable, not just because it serves as the...

In 1988 Larry Bartels advanced the theory of “momentum” in presidential primaries, but ultimately dismissed the notion. Since that time however “momentum” has been demonstrated to exist in financial markets, suggesting that Bartels’ dismissal may have been premature. In this paper I...

The presidential primary processes used by the two major parties misses opportunities to engage voters and incorporate their input in selecting nominees. This report by Fordham Law School's Democracy Clinic advances several reforms to make the primaries more inclusive, including reordering the...

This Article discusses the Trump Administration’s main actions to undermine the role of science in public policy and the consequences for cost-benefit analysis involving climate change policies. It analyzes the specific attacks on science and their impact on relevant policies, namely, the...

We construct a monthly Presidential Economic Approval Rating (PEAR) index from 1981 to 2019, by averaging ratings on president’s handling of the economy across various national polls. In the cross-section, stocks with high betas to changes in the PEAR index significantly under-perform those...

A central question in development economics is whether there are adequate checks and balances on the executive. This paper provides causal evidence on how increasing constraints on the executive, through the removal of Presidential discretion in judicial appointments, promotes the rule of law....

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 gave relatively strong powers to the President. We model and test Executive-Legislative relations in Brazil and demonstrate that Presidents have used pork as a political currency to exchange for votes on policy reforms. In particular Presidents Cardoso and Lula...