Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Philanthropy or other Corporate Social Responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives -- that take the form...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Philanthropy or other Corporate Social Responsibility policies. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form...

This paper uses the unique social structure of Arab communities to examine the effect of social identity on voter turnout. We first show that voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who shares their social group (signified by last name) as compared to other candidates. Using last name as...

We examine the extent to which political scandals influence trust in electoral institutions in established Western democracies. The second ballot of the 2016 Presidential election in Austria needed to be repeated because of inconsistencies in individual electoral districts (scandal districts)....

This paper studies the impact of campaign spending on votes in French legislative elections. We exploit the political financing reforms which were adopted in France in the mid-1990s. Under the new laws, spending limits were reduced, legal persons were no longer allowed to finance candidates, and...

We study the effectiveness of a novel measure to reduce gender gaps in political empowerment: double preference voting conditioned on gender, coupled with gender quotas on candidate lists. This policy was introduced in 2013 in Italian local elections. Using a regression discontinuity design, we...

In the aftermath of elections or ballots, the legitimacy of the result is regularly debated if voter turnout was considered to be low. Hence, discussions about legal reforms to increase turnout are common in most democracies. We analyze the impact of a very small change in voting costs on voter...

We provide evidence about voters' response to crime control policies. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the Italian 2006 collective pardon releasing about one third of the prison population. The pardon created idiosyncratic incentives to recidivate across released individuals and...

Higher economic growth was generated during Democratic presidencies compared to Republican presidencies in the United States. The question is why. Blinder and Watson (2016) explain that the Democratic-Republican presidential growth gap (D-R growth gap) can hardly be attributed to the policies...

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each...