public office determines the overall quality of politicians. Women suffer from gender discrimination in the labor market and …

shocks. When we endogenize the quality of local politicians, we establish a positive link between the development of the … that voters are (rationally) discontent about it. Also, preferences of voters and the politicians about centralization can …

politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with …

-ideological voters, who care about national and local policies, strongly prefer experts. We show that parties compete on good politicians … prediction. We find that politicians with higher ex-ante quality - as measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and …, the characteristics of politicians belonging to opposite parties converge to high-quality levels in close races …

latitude), it shows a significant negative impact on economic growth which is robust to different specifications, polarization …

) encompasses both diversity and polarization, and (ii) accounts for the distance between languages. Our results suggest that … linguistic diversity is a better predictor of redistribution than linguistic polarization. We also find that incorporating …

variety of circumstances, this, in turn, yields a polarization of equilibrium policy choices of the candidates. It is thus …

). These findings are robust to different specifications, polarization measures, instrument sets as well as to a composite …