We study the role of firms' political influence on the effectiveness of government spending using ARRA as a laboratory. Through an IV approach, we show that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of politically connected spending lowers the job creation effect of stimulus by 33 percent at...

Public policies for pollution control, including climate change policies, sometimes allow polluters in one sector subject to an emissions cap to offset excessive emissions in that sector with pollution abatement in another sector. The government may often find it more costly to verify offset...

Screening requirements are common features of fraud and corruption mitigation efforts around the world. Yet imposing these requirements involves trade-offs between higher administrative costs, delayed benefits, and exclusion of genuine beneficiaries on one hand and lower fraud on the other. We...

We study the implications of police discretion for public safety. Highway patrol officers exercise discretion over fines by deviating from statutory fine rules. Relying on variation across officers in this discretionary behavior, we find that harsher sanctions reduce future traffic offending and...

Absence of well-functioning formal institutions leads to reliance on social networks to enforce informal contracts. Social ties may aid cooperation, but agents vary in network centrality, and this hierarchy may hinder cooperation. To assess the extent to which networks substitute for...

Do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We study Italian firms and their workers to answer this question. Our analysis uses a brand-new dataset, spanning the period from 1993 to 2014, where we merge: (i) firm-level balance sheet data; (ii) social...

We demonstrate that personal connections amongst politicians have a significant impact on the voting behavior of U.S. politicians. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians, as well as common seat locations on the chamber floor, are consistent predictors of voting behavior. For...

This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...

This study examines the rise of private health insurance in the United States in the post- World War II era. We investigate the role of the American Medical Association (AMA) which financed a campaign against National Health Insurance that was directed by the country's first political public...