Exploiting regression discontinuity designs in Brazilian, Indian, and Canadian first-past-the-post elections, we document that second-place candidates are substantially more likely than close third-place candidates to run in, and win, subsequent elections. Since both candidates lost the election...

We estimate habit formation in voting--the effect of past on current turnout--by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on U.S. presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that precipitation on current and past election days reduces voter turnout. Our estimates...

Theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties' seat shares determine their bargaining power. We present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction. We use data from 2,898 municipal Spanish elections in which two...

Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions could signal personality traits, like ambition, that are undesirable in the marriage market? We answer this question through two field experiments in an elite U.S. MBA program. Newly-admitted MBA students filled out a...

We study how social media affects election outcomes in the United States. We use variation in the number of Twitter users across counties induced by early adopters at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, a key event in Twitter's rise to popularity. We show that this variation is...

We investigate the role of information frictions in migration. We develop novel moment inequalities to estimate worker preferences while allowing for unobserved worker-specific information sets, migration costs, and location-specific amenities and prices. Using data on internal migration in...

Gendered-grammar languages like Spanish are spoken by 39% of the world's population. In a field experiment in partnership with a Spanish-speaking online platform for technology positions, ads randomly selected to use gender-neutral language receive a larger share of female applicants for...

Conditionality can prevent poor households from receiving cash transfers. Re-analyzing five randomized evaluations of conditional cash transfers, we find: (1) non-compliers -- households that do not meet education conditions -- are common, representing 4.6% to 37% of eligible households; (2)...