Many experts claim that the incidence of suicide attacks is driven by religious cleavages. To test this hypothesis, we investigate whether the total number of suicide attacks per violent conflict or the annual number of suicide attacks per country is associated with simmering religious...

Social justice is a topic of importance to social scientists and also political decision makers. We examine the relationship between globalization and social justice as measured by a new indicator for 31 OECD countries. The results show that countries that experienced rapid globalization enjoy...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...

The United Nations Goldstone Report criminalized self-defense against state-sponsored or state-perpetrated terror. We use voting on the two UN General Assembly resolutions relating to the Goldstone Report to study whether support for the Goldstone principle of criminalization of self-defense...

We investigate a case of political favoritism. Some members of the Bavarian parliament hired relatives as office employees who were paid using taxpayers’ money. We examine whether being involved in the scandal influenced re-election prospects and voter turnout. The results do not show that...

Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of...

We examine moonlighting by politicians in Germany. In July 2007, the German Supreme Court adjudicated that members of parliament (MPs) have to publish details of their outside earnings. Using panel data models, we investigate how outside earnings are correlated with absence and parliamentary...

We examine how donor government ideology influences the composition of foreign aid flows. We use data for 23 OECD countries over the period 1960-2009 and distinguish between multilateral and bilateral aid, grants and loans, recipient characteristics such as income and political institutions,...

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993-2009 period. We employ the new data on the ideological mapping of US...

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principal-agent problem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...