Does "full vertical alignment" - political congruence across national, state, and local tiers - drive economic development? Using a sharp regression discontinuity design based on close state elections in India, we estimate the causal effects of multilevel alignment on growth, inequality, and...

This paper studies how legislative institutions shape distributive policy outcomes. Specifically, I analyze the effect of budget committee membership in the German Bundestag using a novel dataset of 4,629 geocoded federal grants (1999- 2023). Employing a within-legislator...

Many governments operate consumer debt relief programs, often timed to match the election cycle, but their political effects are not well understood. We ask if debt relief can influence elections in democracies. Our motivating exercise is the Biden administration’s promise to relieve student...