"While representation in the U.S. House is based upon state population, each state has an equal number (two) of U.S. Senators. Thus, relative to the state delegations in the U.S. House, small population states are provided disproportionate bargaining power in the U.S. Senate. This paper provides...

While the theoretical literature on non-cooperative legislative bargaining has grown voluminous, there is little empirical work attempting to test a key prediction in this literature: proposal power is valuable. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of...

While representation in the U.S. House is based upon state population, each state has an equal number (two) of U.S. Senators. Thus, relative to the state delegations in the U.S. House, small population states are provided disproportionate bargaining power in the U.S. Senate. This paper provides...

This paper tests for the capitalization of policy platforms into equity prices using a sample of 70 firms favored under Bush or Gore platforms during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election. Two sources of daily data during the six months leading up to the election are incorporated: firm-specific...

Local public goods financed from a national tax base provide concentrated benefits to receipient jurisdictions but disperse costs, creating incentives for legislators to increase own-district spending but to restrain aggregate spending due to the associated tax costs. While these common pool...

Extensive research has documented the importance of social trust for economic development, yet the origins of trust remain largely unexplored. This paper examines the historical relationship between risk, cooperation and the emergence of social trust. I hypothesize that norms of trust developed...

This research attempts to explain the large differences in the early diffusion of the mafia across different areas of Sicily. We advance the hypothesis that, after the demise of Sicilian feudalism, the lack of publicly provided property-right protection from widespread banditry favored the...

How does the internet affect young people's mental health? We study this question in the context of Italy using administrative data on the universe of cases of mental disorders diagnosed in Italian hospitals between 2001 and 2013, which we combine with information on the availability of...

Do media slant news in favor of the banks they borrow from? We study how lending connections affect news coverage of banks earnings reports and of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis on major newspapers from several European countries. We find that newspapers cover announcements by their lenders...