What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures,...

Building on theories of international relations, we analyze how mistrust (uncertainty about an adversary's preferences or capabilities), misperception (imperfect observation of an adversary's actions), and misunderstanding (non-degenerate higher-order beliefs) can lead to conflict and drive its...

This paper analyzes whether the propensity to secede by subnational regions responds mostly to differences in income per capita or to distinct identities. We explore this question in a quantitative political economy model where people's willingness to finance a public good depends on their...

Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

We examine the ways in which political realities shape industrial policy through the lens of modern political economy. We consider two broad "governance constraints": i) the political forces that shape how industrial policy is chosen and ii) the ways in which state capacity affects...

We propose a framework to explain why some societies may end up with different constitutional solutions to the problem of maintaining order in the face of self-interested behavior. Though the salient intellectual tradition since Hobbes has focused on how institutional design is used to eradicate...

This paper explores the labor market returns to working on a victorious political campaign. Using unique administrative data from Brazil, we track the earnings and employment of campaign workers before and after close elections spanning nearly 20 years. We identify sizable returns to working for...

We propose a model of the interplay of employment relationships and community-based interactions among workers and managers. Employment relations can be either tough (where workers are monitored intensively and obtain few rents, and managers do not provide informal favors for their workers) or...

Armed groups routinely delegate domains of rule to village customary chiefs--indirect rule. The larger a chief's power over the villagers relative to the group's, the more there is indirect rule. Over time, enabled by the chief's efforts to legitimize the group, the group expands the taxes they...

In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by...