public office determines the overall quality of politicians. Women suffer from gender discrimination in the labor market and …

shocks. When we endogenize the quality of local politicians, we establish a positive link between the development of the … that voters are (rationally) discontent about it. Also, preferences of voters and the politicians about centralization can …

-ideological voters, who care about national and local policies, strongly prefer experts. We show that parties compete on good politicians … prediction. We find that politicians with higher ex-ante quality - as measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and …, the characteristics of politicians belonging to opposite parties converge to high-quality levels in close races …

politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with …

In this paper we question the common wisdom that more polarized voters’ opinions imply larger policy polarization. We … analyze a voting model in which the source of the polarization in voters’ opinions is “correlation neglect”, that is, voters … neglect the correlation in their information sources. Our main result shows that such polarization in opinions does not …

institutes, the extent to which intellectual competition between different schools of thought may lead to polarization of views …