Campaign expenditures are not effective in increasing candidates vote shares if voters do not respond to the advertisement when they believe that campaign expenditures are financed with tainted money. In this situation, limiting contributions may reduce the number of policy favors that...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

We analyze how the introduction of the voting advice application (VAA) smartvote affects voter turnout, voting behavior and electoral outcomes. The Swiss context offers an ideal setting to identify the causal effects of online information with aggregate real world data because smartvote was...

We study how shocks to voting costs affect electoral turnout. Individuals whose polling place is relocated face changes to their cost of voting in person due to altered distance and unfamiliarity with the new polling place. Using address-level and precinct-level data, we find that polling place...

We provide new experimental evidence which suggests an asymmetric discouragement effect in lottery contests with heterogeneous abilities. Compared to a symmetric contest, subjects invest less effort when facing a stronger opponent, but they invest the same when facing a weaker opponent. Our...

This paper examines the long-run impact of ordinal rank during primary school on productivity using comprehensive English administrative data. Identification is obtained from variation in test score distributions across cohorts and subjects, such that the same score relative to the class mean...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

Economic theory advances various arguments in favor of and against privatizing education. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these arguments influence voters opinions. We analyze two popular referenda in which some 400,000 voters in two Swiss cantons expressed their opinions on the...

We aim to estimate the elasticity of voter turnout. We analyze how voters react to a change in voting costs. Some municipalities in the canton of Berne reduced voting costs by paying the postage of the return envelope when voters opt for postal voting. We find that paying the postage is...

When politicians have lower discount factors than voters, democratic elections cannot sufficiently motivate politicians to undertake long-term socially beneficial projects. When politicians can offer incentive contracts which become effective upon reelection, the hierarchy of contracts and...