Measuring the effect of ballot access restrictions on electoral competition is compli- cated because the stringency of ballot access regulations cannot be treated as being exogenous to candidates' entry decisions. This paper exploits the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down Ohio's...

Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behavior of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institu- tions by examining the...