We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal effect of being elected on subsequent income. Getting...

This paper studies how political fragmentation affects government stability. We show that each additional party with representation in Parliament increases the probability that the incumbent government is unseated by 4 percentage points. Governments with more resources at their disposal for...

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? We leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative...

We exploit the precise timing of natural disasters to provide empirical evidence on the connection between electoral accountability and politicians' support for special interests. We show that, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the evening news substantially reduce their coverage of...

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset linking politicians and election candidates to the universe of firms. To identify the causal effect of access to political power, we exploit (i) new appointments to the company...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) affect the duration of unemployment. In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...

We analyze motivations for, and possible alternatives to, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). With regard to the former, we identify domestic policy failures and various cross-country spillover effects; with regard to the latter, we contrast an economic-theory" perspective on optimal corrective...