Our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. We specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset. Given estimates of the structural model, we assess reelection probabilities,...

Theories of organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the U.S. Congress, explaining why committee systems emerge there, but not explaining variance in organization across legislatures of different countries. To analyze the effects of different constitutional features on the internal...

Self-regulation is the private provision of public goods and private redistribution. This paper examines the scope of self-regulation motivated by altruistic moral preferences that are reciprocal and stronger the closer are citizens in a socioeconomic distance. The focus is on the role of...