After a long debate on wine import tariffs, the Italian Parliament rejected the Spanish-Italian trade agreement on 17 December 1905. This decision left Spain and Italy without a bilateral trade treaty for an entire decade. In the literature, broader political issues and local interests are...

How do voters react to large shocks that are (mostly) outside the control of politicians? We address this question by studying the electoral effects of wildfires in Spain during 1983-2011. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, we find that a large accidental fire up to nine months ahead of...

I exploit the unique institutional framework of Spanish local elections, where municipalities follow different electoral systems depending on their population size, as mandated by a national law. Using a regression discontinuity design, I compare turnout under closed-list proportional...

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain in 1905-1945, a period of extreme political polarization. We find that the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the...

We study how electoral systems affect the presence of women in politics using a model in which both voters and parties might have a gender bias. We apply the model to Spanish municipal elections, in which national law mandates that municipalities follow one of two different electoral systems: a...

Increasing political polarization implies that each election expands the gap between the supporters of the losing side and the winning party. This asymmetry in how citizen’s feel about the outcome of elections could propagate to the institutions under partisan control but also to those...

It is well-known in the literature that income per capita is strongly correlated with the level of democracy across countries. In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that this linear correlation disappears once they control for country-specific effects focusing on within-country...

We document that fiscal multipliers depend on the age structure of the population. Using the variation in military spending and birth rates across U.S. states, we show that local fiscal multipliers increase with the share of young people in total population. We rationalize this fact with a...

Using households' balance sheet composition in the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, we identify six household types. Since 1999, there has been a decline in the share of patient households and an increase in the share of impatient households with negative wealth. Using a six-agent New Keynesian...

This paper studies the effects of anticipations of tax changes in the USA through the release of tax news in the media. I construct a new measure that captures the anticipation of tax bill approvals by exploiting the content of news in the US television. Since this information typically flows...