We estimate the effects of one of the largest anti-vote-buying campaigns ever studied — with half a million voters exposed across 1427 villages—in Uganda’s 2016 elections. Working with civil society organizations, we designed the study to estimate how voters and candidates responded to...

Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the "China shock" literature, we hypothesize...

While people on all sides of the political spectrum were amazed that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination this paper demonstrates that Trump's victory was not a crazy event but rather the equilibrium outcome of a multi-candidate race where one candidate, the buffoon, is viewed as likely to...

Previous literature has found that extending the suffrage to both females and poorer voters increases the supply of public goods. This paper investigates whether the difference in voting between men and women can be explained by differences in income alone, or if there exist gender specific...

Do voters place their trust in tried and tested leaders when uncertainty is high or do they prefer a new slate of leaders who are arguably more competent? To study this question, we make use of hand-collected data on 402,385 candidates who competed in open-list local council elections...