We investigate the reaction of Italian Members of Parliament to a rigorous fact-checking of their public statements. Our research design relies on a novel randomized field experiment in collaboration with the leading Italian fact-checking company. Our results show that politicians are responsive...

In a classical voting situation, each voter in a group is asked to report a ranking over a set of alternatives, and a voting rule is applied to determine a winning alternative. But voters may also hold approval preferences, giving rise to an approval winner. If voters with approval preferences...

We study how granting shareholders an advisory compensation vote affects the subsequent demand for shareholder voting rights. We find that the voting premium decreases when shareholders are given the right to disapprove firm compensation plans, consistent with firms taking preemptive actions...

We consider a model of common-value sequential voting in which voters are differentiated in their information. We ask whether the intuition as in the simultaneous-voting case---voters with no information would vote so as not to influence the outcome---would be valid to imply long voting in our...

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...

Anti-competitive lobbying by incumbents is widely believed to discourage entrepreneurship. In which case, why is there no robust cross-country evidence of a relationship between lobbying and entrepreneurship? To resolve this puzzle we propose a voting model in which social returns from...

Anecdotal reports and small-scale studies suggest that elections are stressful, and might lead to a deterioration in voters’ mental well-being. Nonetheless, researchers have yet to establish whether elections actually make people sick, and if so, why. By applying a regression discontinuity...

We investigate the reaction of Italian Members of Parliament to a rigorous fact-checking of their public statements. Our research design relies on a novel randomized field experiment in collaboration with the leading Italian fact-checking company. Our results show that politicians are responsive...

Normative theories of representative democracy imply that politicians should be better informed of the consequences of a policy than ordinary voters. However, in real life, politicians can have strong convictions that risk blinding them to arguments against their positions. Policy engagement can...