Working Papers

Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data documents what donors actually want from government; and existing research largely neglects donors’ views on individual issues. We…

Can participation in financial markets lead individuals to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, change their political attitudes and even their votes? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned Palestinian and Israeli financial…

How can we help individuals handle financial decisions in an increasingly complex environment? We explore an easily scalable avenue for improving financial understanding: learning by online trading in stocks. We randomly assign 1345 adults…

We study the contracting problem of a principal who chooses between motivating an agent to exert effort or taking her outside option. The agent is privately informed about his ability, where a higher-ability agent faces a lower cost of exerting…

The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a…

Classic arguments for decentralization, augmented by ideas about how participation empowers the poor, motivate the widely used approach in foreign aid called community-driven development.  CDD devolves control over the selection,…

American politics overrepresents the wealthy. But what policies do the wealthy support? Many accounts implicitly assume the wealthy are monolithically conservative and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. Instead, we…

This paper studies the welfare effects of a ‘partial banking union’ in which cross-country …financial transfers that could be used towards bailouts are decided at the supranational level, but policymakers in member countries hold…

I examine the conditions under which trade can support peaceful coexistence and prosperity when particular ethnic groups are cheap targets of violence. A simple theoretical framework reveals that for a broad set of cases, while inter-ethnic…

Politicians are widely perceived to lose significance upon leaving office. Yet media accounts often highlight politicians’ legacies as a source of influence that endures even after they retire. This article assesses these contrasting views by…

Leading research is converging upon the finding that citizens from immigrant-receiving nations strongly prefer the entry of high-skilled to low-skilled immigrants. Prior studies have largely interpreted this “skill premium” as deriving from…

How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question, given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to…

We analyze the classic problem of sustaining trust when cheating and leaving trading partners is easy, and outside enforcement is difficult. We construct equilibria where individuals are loyal to smaller groups– communities– that allow…

Political institutions often use decision making procedures that create veto players—individuals or groups who, despite lacking direct decision making authority, nevertheless have the power to  block policy change. In this paper we…

We present a theory of dynamic coalitions for a legislative bargaining game in which policies continue in effect in the absence of new legislation. We characterize Markov perfect equilibria with dynamic coalitions, which are decisive sets of…

I develop a simple hold-up model of political risk, which can be used to explore firms’ strategic options when their investments are subject to the threat of government expropriation. In the model, a firm decides whether to invest and then the…

Two key features of the government bailout programs implemented in the 2008- 2009 financial crisis were: first, the general opposition of voters to these programs and second, the implementation of a variety of interventions, ranging from targeted…

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters…

An emergent theme in the study of organizations is the broad differences in managerial practice and performance across firms. We develop an explanation for these phenomena that turns on the complexity of the environments that firms…

The policy choices of governments are frequently durable. From the building of bridges to the creation of social programs, investments in public infrastructure typically last well beyond a single electoral cycle. In this paper we…