We study how anti-fascism during Mussolini's dictatorship in Italy affects support for right-wing parties at 1948-2022 democratic elections. Using newly-digitized historical data, we construct a measure of anti-fascism from the universe of recorded regime opponents, and we resolve simultaneity...

How can we motivate good politicians those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens' preferences to enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. We find that emphasizing prosocial motives for holding political...

Many studies exploit close elections in a regression discontinuity framework to identify partisan effects, i.e. the effect of having a given party in office on the outcome. We argue that, when conducted on single-member districts, such analysis may identify a compound effect: the partisan...

I use voting outcomes from the European Parliament to construct a novel sector-specific measure for revealed environmental policy preferences for EU member states. Applying a theory-consistent structural gravity model on carbon embodied in trade between 2000 and 2014, this study finds that...

Terrorist attacks have often been found to impact voting behaviours in the country of the attack. Here I study the impact of 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York on voting preferences in the UK, concluding that 9/11 impacted the voting intentions of the British, significantly increasing...

Blockchains hold the potential to revolutionize our economic systems, but their success hinges on effective self-governance. One crucial question is how these decentralized systems should gather user input — a hotly debated topic. Though most blockchains rely on a form of linear stake-weighted...

As blockholders in most public firms, the "Big Three"" passive fund managers — Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street — have an outsized influence on shareholder voting. While these investors tend to vote according to management's recommendations, it is unclear whether they are overly...

We examine why institutional investors vote the way they vote on director elections, using a novel dataset on voting rationales provided by institutional investors. We find that the most important reasons for opposing directors are board independence, board diversity, tenure, firm governance,...

Director elections are a key corporate governance mechanism, and attendance of board meetings is typically the only observable measure of individual director effort. However, little is known is about shareholder voting response to director absences. Using data on large UK public companies, we...