This paper investigates how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects the competition intensity in a dynamic elimination contest. Theory predicts that the absolute level of investment costs has no effect on the competition intensity in homogeneous interactions. Relative cost...

Attorneys elected to the US House of Representatives and to US state legislatures are systematically less likely to vote in favor of tort reforms that restrict tort litigation, but more likely to support bills that extend tort law. This finding is based on the analysis of 54 votes at the federal...

In Switzerland, two key church institutions the Conference of Swiss Bishops (CSB) and the Federation of Protestant Churches (FPC) make public recommendations on how to vote for certain referenda. We leverage this unique situation to directly measure religious organizations power to shape human...

Adolf Hitler's seizure of power was one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century. Yet, our understanding of which factors fueled the astonishing rise of the Nazis remains highly incomplete. This paper shows that religion played an important role in the Nazi party's electoral...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

This paper exploits a natural experiment in Hesse where a reform of the electoral rule from mayor appointment by the local council towards direct mayor elections was introduced during a phase-in period from 1993 to 1998. The end of the term of the last appointed mayor varies across...

We investigate the geographical concentration of representatives and the distribution of fiscal transfers both theoretically and empirically. We develop a model which predicts that funds to an area are positively correlated with the number of representatives residing in that area. Our empirical...

This paper suggests a new approach for centrality measures for general (weighted) networks taking into account the importance for cohesion and relative power of connections. While existing literature either ignores the importance for cohesion or measures it by analyzing consequences arising from...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower competent politicians. In our model, candidates are privately informed about their abilities and are driven by office rents as well as...

When based on perceived rather than on objective income distributions, the Meltzer-Richards hypothesis and the POUM hypothesis work quite well empirically: there exists a positive link between perceived inequality or perceived upward mobility and the extent of redistribution in democratic...