This paper examines the role played by sitting presidents during United States midterm congressional elections between 1982 and 2006. I examine the effects of presidential campaign appearances on behalf of candidates for the House of Representatives. Conventional wisdom holds that such...

We investigate the influence of electoral rules and voter information in elections on voting outcomes and the quality of public officials, using new data on state court judge elections in 39 states in the U.S. from 1990 to 2010. We find, first, that voting is very partisan in partisan judicial...

A defining feature of public sector employment is the regular change in elected leadership. Yet, we know little about how elections influence careers. We describe how elections can alter policy outputs and disrupt civil servants' influence over agency decisions, potentially shaping their career...

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on U.S. Congressional elections. We find that U.S. counties subject to greater competition from China via a change in U.S. trade policy exhibit relative increases in turnout, the share of votes cast for Democrats and the probability that the...

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic change in IPO activity around the world. Though vibrant IPO activity, attributed to better institutions and governance, used to be a strength of the U.S., it no longer is. IPO activity in the U.S. has fallen compared to the rest of the world...

Counter to extant stylized facts, using newly available data on country allocations in U.S. investors' foreign equity portfolios we find that (i) U.S. investors do not exhibit returns-chasing behavior, but, consistent with partial portfolio rebalancing, tend to sell past winners; and (ii) U.S....

The program-to-policy linkage refers to the level of congruence between what political parties promise during election campaigns, as set out in their election programs, and the policies delivered by governments after elections. The program-to-policy linkage is an important element of modern...

In the growing literature on presidential elections, economic circumstances have a privileged position. Nearly all of the models designed to predict the 2008 presidential election included one or more aggregate economic indicators or aggregate public evaluations of economic circumstances. The...

To a remarkable degree, population growth in the United States is unevenly distributed and, at present, most evident in places where Republicans dominate the Democrats. These two effects result from an ongoing trend that persisted in the current decade: migration favors suburbs and disperses the...