Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of education on mental health, we rely on a rich longitudinal dataset that contains...

I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1997. Controlling for the incumbent President's activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign the New York Times gives more emphasis to topics that are owned by the Democratic party (civil rights, health...

This paper develops an infinite-horizon, political agency model with a continuum of political districts, in which incumbent politicians can improve their re-election probability by attracting swing voters in key states through strategic trade protection. A unique equilibrium is shown to exist...

The paper characterises the choice rules that can be implemented when agents are unable to commit themselves not to renegotiate the mechanism.

In this paper we present a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. In particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme, lobbying...

There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of direct democracy on redistribution has attracted much less attention....

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...