In this paper, we study the extent to which social connections influence the legislative effectiveness of members of the U.S. Congress. We propose a new model of legislative effectiveness that formalizes the role of social connections and generates simple testable predictions. The model predicts...

We study the extent to which personal connections among legislators influence abstentions in the U.S. Congress. Our analysis is conducted by observing representatives' abstention for the universe of roll call votes held on bills in the 109th-113th Congresses. Our results show that a legislator's...

We examine the effect of hearing cases alongside female judicial colleagues on the probability that a federal judge hires a female law clerk. Federal judges are assigned to cases and to judicial panels at random and have few limitations on their choices of law clerks: these two features make the...

This paper studies how interest groups allocate campaign contributions when congressmen are connected by social ties. We establish conditions for the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies for the contribution game and characterize the associated allocation of the interest...

We present a model of the U.S. Congress in which social connections among Congress members are endogenous and matter for their legislative activity. We propose a novel equilibrium concept for the network formation game that allows for a sharp characterization of equilibrium behavior and that...

To study the role of tax professionals, we merge tax records of 2.5 million taxpayers in Italy with the respective audit files from the tax revenue agency. Our data covers the entire population of sole proprietorship taxpayers in seven regions, followed over seven fiscal years. We first document...

We present an informational theory of public protests, according to which public protests allow citizens to aggregate privately dispersed information and signal it to the policy maker. The model predicts that information sharing of signals within social groups can facilitate information...