We examine the labor supply of politicians using data on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). We exploit the introduction of a law that equalized MEPs' salaries, which had previously differed by as much as a factor of ten. Doubling an MEP's salary increases the probability of running for...

The ongoing controversy over Melrose’s purchase of engineering company GKN illustrates many common misunderstandings about how free markets can work to the benefit of all. Shareholders, not politicians, should decide how to run their businesses, including whether a new management team could do...

Fiscal rules, i.e., constraints to the policymaking discretion of elected officials in terms of deficit and expenditures, are widely used tools to regulate fiscal policies. This paper shows that they can negatively affect the quality of candidates willing to run for office. We build a simple...

Opportunistic politicians maximize the probability of reelection and rents from office holding. Can it be optimal from their point of view to delegate policy choices to independent bureaucracies? The answer is yes: politicians will delegate some policy tasks, though in general not those that...

Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates the e fficiency criteria for allocating policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non elected bureaucrats. Politicians are more efficient for tasks that do not involve too much specific technical...

Women are now playing a crucial role in the growth of the economy and have made a substantial impact and achieved success across all sectors. However, Indian women in manufacturing account for only 20% of the total workforce which is relatively less compared to other countries, like China. For...

How can we motivate "good" politicians — those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens' preferences — to enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. We find that emphasizing pro-social motives for...

We use new annual data on gasoline taxes and corporate income taxes from U.S. states to analyze whether politicians avoid tax increases in election years. These data contain 3 useful attributes: (1) when state politicians enact tax laws, (2) when state politicians implement tax laws on consumers...

What political legacy is bequeathed by national health crises such as epidemics? We show that epidemic exposure in an individual’s “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative effect on confidence in political institutions and leaders. The effect is specific to the...

Concern over the high rate of contagion of COVID-19 has prompted world authorities to use the strategy of isolation and social confinement as the main non-pharmacological weapon against the disease that has rapidly killed millions of people worldwide. However, there is evidence that the...

What political legacy is bequeathed by national health crises such as epidemics? We show that epidemic exposure in an individual's "impressionable years" (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative effect on confidence in political institutions and leaders. The effect is specific to the...

This paper investigates the impact of voter support on the representation of women in the political profession. The empirical analysis exploits two-stage elections in the United States and Italy to hold the selection of candidates constant. In two-stage elections, candidates are admitted to the...

Local politicians can function as crucial intermediaries between voters and party bosses in a clientelistic network. We study their role by matching data on 300 million welfare payments in the Indian state of West Bengal to village-level election returns. Local politicians systematically...

Does politician quality matter for policy in representative governments? I use administrative registry data on local politicians in Finland and exploit exogenous variation generated by close electoral races that shift the quality composition of local councils to show that (i) electing more...

This paper investigates the impact of voter support on the representation of women in the political profession. The empirical analysis exploits two-stage elections in the United States and Italy to hold the selection of candidates constant. In two-stage elections, candidates are admitted to the...

We try to demonstrate how economists may engage in research on comparative politics, relating the size and composition of government spending to the political system. A Downsian model of electoral competition and forward-looking voting indicates that majoritarian -- as opposed to proportional --...

Using a unique hand collected sample of professional connections between finance ministers and the directors and top executives of the three largest credit rating agencies for 38 European sovereigns between January 2000 and November 2017, we show that professional connections result in higher...

We study shareholder support for corporate board nominees in the context of the California gender quota, which was passed in 2018. Using hand-collected data for approximately 600 firms, we show that, prior to the quota, female nominees received greater shareholder support than their male...

Eine Studie zeigt: Steht ein Arzt an der Spitze des Gesundheitsministeriums, steigen die Investitionen im Krankenhaussektor. Sollten Politikerinnen und Politiker Fachleute sein? Diese Frage wird häufig nach Regierungsbildungen diskutiert. Welchen Einfluss Fachkompetenz auf die Amtsführung hat,...

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 officially granted voting rights to women across the United States. However, many states extended full or partial suffrage to women before the federal amendment. In this paper, we discuss the history of women's enfranchisement using an...

We examine whether politicians' hometown favoritism exists in the assignment of corporate tax benefits. Taking advantage of a unique tax disclosure rule in China that allows us to identify firm-specific tax benefits, we find that firms are granted more favorable tax treatments if they have a...

This paper investigates how politicians' patronage connections affect privatizations in China. The connections to top political leaders (i.e., Central Committee of the Communist Party of China) make local politicians engage more in rent-seeking by selling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at...

Do donor-funded politicians benefit their donors disproportionately? If so, how? This paper examines the impact of electing donor-funded politicians using a novel dataset that uniquely links campaign donors with recipients of public contracts during mayors' incumbency period in Colombia. Using a...

We document a direct channel through which financial institutions contribute to the net worth of members of the U.S. Congress, particularly those sitting on the finance committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives. These individuals report greater levels of leverage and new...

We estimate the impact of French town hall elections held in mid-March 2020 on the mortality of 170,000 male candidates aged above 60. Their excess mortality during March and April was similar to the general population. We compare candidates in cities with two candidate lists to those in cities...

What political legacy can we expect from the Coronavirus pandemic? Drawing evidence from past epidemics, we find that epidemic exposure in an individual's “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative effect on confidence in political institutions and leaders, but not in...

What will be political legacy of the Coronavirus pandemic? We find that epidemic exposure in an individual's "impressionable years" (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative effect on confidence in political institutions and leaders. We find similar negative effects on confidence in public...

This paper provides novel evidence that female U.S. House Representatives causally increase the U.S. government's demand for products and services provided by female entrepreneurs. Using detailed data on individual contracts between the U.S. federal government and private firms around close U.S....

The serious implications of privatizing state-owned enterprises for politicians, managers, and investors make such decisions highly contingent on firm characteristics and past performance, complicating the identification of the privatization effects. A unique opportunity for this identification...

In many situations, people can lie strategically, for their own benefit. Since individuals differ with respect to their willingness to lie, the credibility of statements will crucially depend on who self-selects into such cheap-talk situations. We study this process in a two-stage political...

Successful place-based leadership is based on functional networks, dialogue among stakeholders, political support and funding, and sharing power. The EU-funded Integrated Urban Development Plans (IUDPs) require the participation of citizens and local nonprofit organizations. When creating an...