We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous...

International environmental agreements (IEAs) often condition entry into force on ratification by a minimum number of countries, yet deep environmental commitments frequently face strong domestic political resistance. We study how IEA breadth, through minimum ratification thresholds (MRTs), and...

I study how political parties affect representation in the U.S. House. To do so, I account for party pressure on the votes of members in an otherwise standard spatial model that uses roll call voting patterns to identify member ideologies. I simultaneously estimate voter ideologies from survey...

We develop a model of monetary policy committee decision-making, building on the framework of games played through agents (GPTA). Interest groups seek to influence policy by offering action-contingent contracts to committee members. The resulting equilibrium admits a simple characterization and...