This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on the quality of institutions in recipient countries. Our identification strategy exploits the shift in US foreign policy due the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment. The associated change in...

We derive four sets of counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the time period 1999 to 2012. They approximate desirable national interest rates countries would have liked to implement if they could still conduct independent monetary policy. We find that...

This paper introduces hyperbolic discounting into politics. In our model, politicians act according to the preferences of voters in order to be re-elected. As voters' preferences are dynamically inconsistent, the political process results in an allocation of the public budget that is distorted...

Measuring the effect of ballot access restrictions on electoral competition is compli- cated because the stringency of ballot access regulations cannot be treated as being exogenous to candidates' entry decisions. This paper exploits the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down Ohio's...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behavior of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institu- tions by examining the...

Using a panel of naturalizations in U.S. states from 1986 to 2012, we empirically analyze the impact of elections on immigration policy. Our results indicate that immigration policy is (partly) driven by national elections: there are more naturalizations in presidential election years and during...