Patent boxes have been heavily debated for their role in corporate tax competition. This paper uses firm-level data for the period 2000-2011 for the top 2,000 corporate research and development (R&D) investors worldwide to consider the determinants of patent registration across a large sample of...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...

This paper investigates the differential response of male and female voters to competitive persuasion in political campaigns. We implemented a survey experiment during the (mixed gender) electoral race for mayor in Milan (2011), and a field experiment during the (same gender) electoral race for...

This paper analyzes how to allocate experts into committees that use the unanimity rule to make decisions. We show that an optimal allocation of experts is extremely asymmetric. To reach the optimal allocation, therefore, one needs only to rank the experts in terms of their abilities and then...

We estimate the effect of electorally induced policy uncertainty on investment in the manufacturing sector. Because state governors exercise considerable influence over legislation and considerable discretion over regulation and permitting, and because the policies relevant to business...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

Partisan conflict and policy uncertainty are frequently invoked as factors contributing to slow post-crisis recoveries. Recent events in Europe provide ample evidence that the political aftershocks of financial crises can be severe. In this paper we study the political fall-out from systemic...

We propose a forensic approach to investigate the politico-economic forces that influence narrow vote outcomes in legislative assemblies. Applying nonparametric estimation techniques to a data set covering all roll call votes between 1990 and 2014, we can identify the existence of precise...

Voter turnout has declined in many industrialized countries, raising the question of whether electoral institutions increase voter turnout. We exploit an electoral reform in the Austrian state of Burgenland as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of opening hours of polling...

In European Parliament elections turnout rates, traditionally lower than in national parliamentary elections, decrease from one elections to the next, and show strong variations within and between countries. What explains this decline? Why are there such big differences between and within the EU...