Altruistic punishment is a fundamental driver for cooperation in human interactions. In this paper, we expand our understanding of this form of costly punishment to help explain a puzzle of voting behavior: why do people who are indifferent between two potential policy outcomes of an election...

Campaign expenditures are not effective in increasing candidates' vote shares if voters do not respond to the advertisement when they believe that campaign expenditures are financed with "tainted money". In this situation, limiting contributions may reduce the number of policy favors that...

Considerable concern has been expressed in resent years about declines in voter participartion rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates intropuce a "class bias" into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from...

We document the effectiveness of robo calls for increasing voter participation despite most published research finding little or no effect of automated calls. We establish this finding in a large field experiment in a targeted, partisan get-out-the-vote campaign. Our experimental design includes...

We investigate the geographical concentration of representatives and the distribution of fiscal transfers both theoretically and empirically. We develop a model which predicts that funds to an area are positively correlated with the number of representatives residing in that area. Our empirical...