Motivated by recent interest and initiatives taken by several governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well-being to inform policy makers, we test if subjective well-being measures (SWB) can be employed to study voting behaviour. Controlling for financial and...

In September 1992 French voters approved the Maastrict Treaty. This paper analyzes political and economic forces that affected French voters, and the links between the progress of European integration and changes in the pattern of redistribution. A model of referendum choice is tested against a...

Motivated by recent interest and initiatives taken by several governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well-being to inform policy makers, we test if subjective well-being measures (SWB) can be employed to study voting behaviour. Controlling for financial and...

We consider a Barro-type endogenous growth model in which the government's purchases of goods and services enter into the production function. The provision of government services is financed by flat-rate (linear) income or lump-sum taxes. It is assumed that individuals differing in their...

Despite the economic importance of the U.S. stock market, there is strikingly little evidence of its impact on elections. Using county-level variation in stock market participation, we document a causal impact of market returns on election outcomes. High-participation counties are more likely to...

I examine the effect of house price declines on voter participation using a novel person-level panel dataset. Contrary to what the “angry voter hypothesis” predicts, I find that a ten percent decline in local house prices decreases the participation rate of the average mortgaged homeowner by...

In this paper, we present a model of cultural transmission of preferences on goods, some of which are provided publicly through simple majority voting. We emphasize the existence of a two-way causality between socialization decisions and political outcomes. This generates the possibility of...

In The Myth of the Rational Voter Brian Caplan shows that voters entertain systematically biased beliefs on a number of essential issues of economic policy and concludes that this leads democracies to choose bad policies. We introduce the psychological concept of mental models to address voter'...

In a much cited 2008 article, Per Pettersson-Lidbom uses regression discontinuity to test for Swedish party effects on economic policies such as municipal taxation, spending and employment. We reassess the issue using the same estimator as Pettersson-Lidbom but new data on all factual...