Integration of immigrants is a two-way process, the success of which depends both on immigrants and on natives. We provide new evidence on the determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration, using data from the 2005 and 2010 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel. In particular, we...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. Our key insight is that linking benefits to past earnings (less redistributiveness) reduces the efficiency cost of social security (due to endogenous...

We analyze a contest between two groups where group members have differing valuations for the contested rent. Generically the pivotal group member with the median valuation of the rent will not act himself but will want to send a group member that has preferences different to her own into the...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1,929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3,708 were Finnish). An increase in beauty by one standard...

This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. We relate the stylized fact to an efficiency-redistribution trade-off to be resolved by political process. The inefficiency of social security...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on who wants to be a politician. We take advantage of a considerable 35 percent salary increase of Finnish MPs in the year 2000, intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive. A difference-indifferences analysis, using...

A growing theoretical literature on the effect of politicians' salaries on the average level of skills of political candidates yields ambiguous predictions. In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on the level of education of parliamentary candidates. We take advantage of an...

Previous research has established that good-looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...