Recent studies report that economic inequality is associated with reduced government expenditures on social programs. Several prominent social scientists, including Putman (Putnam, R., 2000. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, New York), attribute this to the detrimental "psychosocial effects" of...

Elsewhere (Groseclose and Milyo <CitationRef CitationID="CR1">2010</CitationRef>), we examine a game where each legislator has preferences over (i) the resulting policy and (ii) how he or she votes. The latter preferences are especially important when the legislator is not pivotal. We show that when the game follows the normal rules of...</citationref>

The world's population is living longer but retiring earlier, and vast numbers of adults now spend as much as 1/3 of their lifetimes relying on public and private retirement benefits. Consequently, labor economists are interested in the forces driving retirement behavior, seeking to understand...

There is a vast empirical literature on the allocation of corporate PAC contributions in Congressional elections and the influence that these contributions have on the policy-making process. The attention given to PAC contributions is far in excess of their actual importance. Corporate PAC...

We measure media bias by estimating ideological scores for several major media outlets. To compute this, we count the times that a particular media outlet cites various think tanks and policy groups, and then compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same groups. Our results...

The 44 Liquormart decision, eliminating Rhode Island's ban on liquor price advertising, made Rhode Island the subject of a natural experiment for measuring the effect of advertising on prices. Using Massachusetts prices as controls, we find that advertising stores substantially cut only prices...

This paper introduces a structural model of campaign finance which permits estimation of the marginal costs of raising money as well as the marginal benefits of spending and saving money. The model is estimated for the 1986 through 1990 election cycles; the results demonstrate that the...

Several non-experimental studies claim that heterogeneity among individuals reduces trust. A few experimental studies have examined the effects of naturally-occurring differences among subjects on trusting behavior, and in contrast, most have not supported these claims. We adopt a novel approach...