I examine the effect of legislative turnover on the size and composition of government expenditures in Indian state elections during 1980-2000. The paper finds that excessive turnover in Indian state elections results in an inefficient government expenditure policy. First, the higher the...

An examination of how increased turnover among legislators in the fifty U.S. states affects fiscal policy and economic growth finds that it makes legislators short-sighted. Turnover increases the size of government by increasing the shares of both total spending and taxes in income. In...

This paper estimates the effect of a candidate’s incumbency status on his or her chances of winning using a large dataset on state legislative elections in India during 1975-2003. I use an innovative research design, called Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), that provides unbiased estimate...

This paper estimates the incumbency effects in the legislative elections of 45 states in the US during the period 1968-89. I improve upon the existing measures of incumbency by using a quasi-experimental research design that isolates the effect due to incumbency from other contemporaneous...