Recent studies of individual attitudes toward immigration emphasize concerns about labor market competition as a potent source of anti- immigrant sentiment, in particular among less-educated or less-skilled citizens who fear being forced to compete for jobs with low-skilled immigrants willing to...

Recent studies of public attitudes toward trade have converged upon one central finding: support for trade restrictions is highest among respondents with the lowest levels of education. This has been interpreted as strong support for the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, the classic economic treatment...

Recent articles in International Organization and elsewhere have explored the role of domestic institutions in shaping exchange rate regime choice. These articles use some variation on the information reported by governments to the International Monetary Fund as their dependent variable. Even...

A majority of surveyed consumers claim to prefer ethically certified products over non-certified alternatives, and to be willing to pay a price premium for such products. There is no clear evidence, however, that people actually seek out such ethically certified goods and pay a premium for them...

Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives’ attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology....

We provide new evidence on consumer demand for ethical products from experiments conducted in a U.S. grocery store chain. We find that sales of the two most popular coffees rose by almost 10% when they carried a Fair Trade label as compared to a generic placebo label. Demand for the...

Recent research suggests that, public perceptions notwithstanding, members of Congress are rather mediocre investors. Why do the consummate political insiders fail to profit as investors? We consider various explanations that pertain to members' political relationships to public firms. We show...

While the role of money in policymaking is a central question in political economy research, surprisingly little attention has been given to the rents politicians actually derive from politics. We use both matching and a regression discontinuity design to analyze an original dataset on the...

A common claim in the democratization literature is that foreign free media undermine authoritarian rule. No reliable micro-level evidence on this topic exists, however, since independent survey research is rarely possible in authoritarian regimes and self-selection into media consumption...

Building on an idea in Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), this article investigates the application of synthetic control methods to comparative case studies. We discuss the advantages of these methods and apply them to study the effects of Proposition 99, a large-scale tobacco control program that...