Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding...

Fatal school shootings often spark support for stricter gun laws, threatening the gun lobby's influence and agenda. To prevent political fallout, do pro-gun Political Action Committees increase contributions after fatal school shootings? Leveraging a novel dataset of pro-gun PAC contributions...

We develop a model of strategic information provision where politicians choose how to allocate limited disclosure across multiple policy dimensions. Citizens are heterogeneous statistical learners who interpret data differently, following Liang (2021). Our key insight: spreading information...

Stimulus transfers are widely used during economic downturns, yet they are often poorly targeted from an economic perspective. I show that political incentives might help explain this discrepancy. I study one of the largest stimulus tax credits in Italy which excluded the poorest individuals and...

Election results act as powerful signals, shaping social behavior in ways that can be dramatic and even violent. This paper shows how racial violence in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South was tied to the local performance of the anti-Black Democratic Party in presidential elections. Using a...

This chapter reviews the literature on the relationship between culture and political preferences. We distinguish conceptually between the direct cultural transmission of political ideology and the transmission of more primitive preferences and beliefs that influence preferences over policies,...

We estimate the impact of a political party's ability to unilaterally redistrict Congressional seats upon partisan seat share allocations in the U.S. House of Representatives. Controlling for stateXdecade and year effects, we find an 8.2 percentage point increase in the Republican House seat...

Research on female political representation has tended to overlook the traditional role of women as leaders across many societies. Our study aims to address this gap by investigating the enduring influence of historical female political leadership on contemporary formal political representation...