Do ingroup biases distort the behavior of public officials? Recent studies detect large ethnic biases in elite political behavior, but their case selection leaves open the possibility that bias obtains under relatively narrow historical and institutional conditions. We clarify these scope...

Political expression often revolves around ethnic, religious, or cultural group identities. I develop a game-theoretic model explaining how group identities interact with citizens' social environments to induce political behavior designed to express group identity. Citizens make political...

An emerging literature emphasizes the importance of vote brokers for electoral politics in the developing world. Yet in spite of the great interest in the topic, attempts to assess the impact of vote brokerage on election returns are exceedingly rare. This paper provides the first explicit...

A lack of direct electoral checks on government bureaucrats challenges norms of democratic accountability. One proposed solution is to increase the president's control over federal agencies. It is, however, an open question as to whether voters will attribute responsibility to the president even...

We offer an institutional explanation for the dramatic decline in corrupt practices that characterizes British political development in the mass suffrage era. Parliamentary candidates who faced corruption charges were judged by tribunals of sitting MPs until 1868, when this responsibility was...

What are the origins of colonial forced labor? While extensive research investigates the effects of colonial forced labor on contemporary political and economic development, little is known about the origins of colonial forced labor. Based on historical accounts, we offer a simple formal model...

I exploit the sudden and dramatic jolt that Osama Bin Laden's capture gave to Barack Obama's 2012 re-election prospects to gauge the relationship between presidential prospects and stock market valuation changes. Using campaign contributions as an indicator of political support, I find that...

We employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on close elections to estimate the rents from a seat in the U.S. Congress between 1850 and 1880. Using census data, we compare wealth accumulation among those who won or lost their first race by a small margin. We find evidence of...

I consider a heterogeneous federal system in which policy coordination is desirable but underprovided in the absence of a federal intervention. To improve policy coordination, the federal layer can intervene by imposing bounds on local policies. These federal bounds define a restricted policy...

Some scholars known as <italic>offensive realists</italic> claim that in the uncertainty of world politics, trust and cooperation between states is extremely unlikely. Others, such as <italic>defensive realists</italic>, claim that rational states are capable of finding ways to counteract the complications created by...