Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

This paper develops a theory of policy making, that examines the incentives for experimentation with new policies and the scrappage of adopted policies. We demonstrate that a government which cares about its reputation out of electoral concerns, takes socially ine?cient policy gambles that may...

Many policies enhance welfare under certain conditions, but have the potential to generate private rents at other times. This can prompt rent-seeking governments to adopt such policies excessively. If the economy's constituents can easily detect opportunistic policymaking, rent-seeking is...

This is one of the first studies to estimate a popularity function at the micro-level. Using German micro-level data (GGSS/ALLBUS) for the years 1991, 1992, 1998, and 2008, we show that a positive assessment of the economy significantly improves government popularity while negative evaluations...

Even after four decades of research it remains unclear, whether presidential popularity depends on the state of the economy. While about half of all studies for the United States find a significant effect of unemployment and inflation on presidential popularity, the others do not. Additional...

This paper investigates social preferences towards unemployment and inflation in the United States. Estimating a popularity function with monthly data for the recent Obama administration, we find that U.S. voters react strongly to both unemployment and inflation. However, reducing unemployment...

We study the political economy of policy innovations during the U.S. welfare reform in 1996. Specifically, we investigate how reputation concerns among governors influence the decision to experiment with welfare policies. In line with a political agency model, our empirical results suggest that...

We study the effects of preselection on an expert's incentive to give truthful advice. In a decision environment in which certain decisions yield more precise estimates about the expert's expertise, a mediocre expert's advice is biased. We show that this bias can be undone by the introduction of...