We present a model of political budget cycles in which incumbents influence voters by targeting government spending to specific groups of voters at the expense of other voters or other expenditures. Each voter faces a signal extraction problem: being targeted with expenditure before the election...

We use a temporary ban on inter-province shipping of live hogs induced by the 2018 outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in China as a natural experiment to study spatial mechanisms behind the dynamics of market integration. With a unique dataset of weekly provincial hog prices, we employ a...