Working Papers

Although doctors and hospitals own their patients’ medical records, state and federal laws require that they provide patients with a copy at “reasonable cost.” We examine the effects of state laws that…

This paper examines the optimal degree of centralization that can be achieved with respect to bailout policies when a central authority cannot supervise the entire banking system of the economy. Part of the banking system is supervised by a local…

I study public liquidity provision in a liquidity-constrained economy in which government policy is decided by politicians subject to rent-seeking and electoral constraints. Public interventions are modeled as a choice between direct fiscal…

How do political predispositions shape the social relationships individuals create? To address these issues, we leverage the domain of online dating, in which we can observe people’s political identities and preferences before they express a…

Psychologists have long observed that people conform to majority opinion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “bandwagon effect.” In the political domain people learn about prevailing public opinion via ubiquitous polls, which may…

Understanding the mechanisms by which political advertising affects voters is crucial for evaluating the welfare effects of campaign finance and election regulation. This paper develops a method to distinguish between two alternative mechanisms…

Fixed statutes and regulations often have variable consequences over time. If left unattended, such drift can severely erode the performance of government as an institution of representation. To better understand the mechanics of policy-making in…

Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their…

The role of deliberation among citizens to determine and forge agreement on policy is often seen as a crucial feature of democratic government. This paper provides the first large-N empirical evidence on the credibility of voice in a deliberative…

The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have been successful…

This paper illustrates a practical framework for understanding and predicting political economy risk for project managers operating in a variety of developing country settings, including non-democracies, ethnically diverse environments and…

Can combat experience foster organizational skills that engender political collective action? We use the arbitrary assignment of troops to frontline combat in World War 2 to identify the effect of combat experience on two channels that change…

The English Parliament’s struggle for supremacy in the seventeenth century was crucial for the development of representative government in the English-speaking world, yet its lessons continue to be debated. This paper provides the first…

We introduce a model in which firms trade goods via bilateral contracts which specify a buyer, a seller, and the terms of the exchange. This setting subsumes (many-to-many) matching with contracts, as well as supply chain matching. When firms…

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a governing coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policies. Equilibria can involve active lobbying…

We examine the question of how competition between governments within metropolitan areas affects economic growth outcomes. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we find that the number of county governments is…

According to what criteria do citizens make political decisions, and what do these criteria say about democratic competence? An impressive body of evidence suggests that voters competently evaluate diagnostic information such as macroeconomic…

This paper estimates a three-equation structural model based on a theory that relates corporate financial performance (CFP), corporate social performance (CSP), and social pressure. CFP is found to be independent of CSP and decreasing in social…

One consequence of the proliferation of vote-by-mail (VBM) in certain areas of the United States is the opportunity for voters to cast ballots weeks before Election Day. Understanding the ensuing effects of VBM on late campaign information loss…

This paper analyses the incentives that shaped Hindu and Muslim interaction in India’s towns from the rise of Islam to the rise of European intervention in the 17th century; it argues that differences in the degree to which medieval Hindus and…