We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and losses and then to voting. The Social Democrats proposed budget cuts affecting parents with young...

We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and losses and then to voting. The Social Democrats proposed budget cuts affecting parents with young...

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...

In their reply to our comment, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I., \& Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2009). A response to the comment on education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers. Economics of Education Review] did not address our fundamental criticism that they...

In a recent paper, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I. \& Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2005). Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Portugal vs. Spain. Economics of Education Review, 24(2), 161-170] apply the generalized IV model of Hausman and Taylor to...

Recent research has documented that competent-looking political candidates do better in US elections and that babyfaced individuals are generally perceived to be less competent than maturefaced individuals. Taken together, this suggests that babyfaced political candidates are perceived as less...

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 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral...

We investigate to what extent tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth. Data from the World Values Survey enable us to investigate tolerance–growth relationships for 54 countries. We provide estimates based on cross-sectional as well as...

Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve...