"Many believe that stricter campaign finance reform laws will improve the public's perception of the integrity of the election process and lessen their cynicism about politics. But will campaign finance reform change the public's attitudes towards our politics? The authors use a series of public...

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>

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...

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...

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...