This paper studies how political competition can lead candidates to strategically increase the salience of specific issues, in order to influence voting decisions of marginal groups, with non trivial consequences for turnout rates. In my setup issues differ in their divisiveness, to be defined...

The trade war initiated by the Trump administration is the largest since the US imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s and was still raging when he left office. We analyze how the trade war impacted the 2020 US Presidential election. Our results highlight the political salience of the...

A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

This paper develops a recursive model of voter turnout and voting outcomes at the U.S. county level to investigate the socioeconomic determinants of recent U.S. presidential elections. It exploits cross-section variations across U.S. counties and investigates the key determinants of the 2016...

Through social media, politicians can personalize their campaigns and target specific groups of voters with an unprecedented precision. We assess the effects of such political micro-targeting by exploiting daily advertising prices on Facebook during the 2016 US presidential campaign. We measure...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...

What are the political consequences of the diffusion of broadband internet? We address this question by studying the 2008 US presidential election, the first political campaign where the internet played a key role. Drawing on data from the FEC and the FCC, we provide robust evidence that...

In this paper we investigate the effect of Donald Trump's campaign for coal in his successful race for the White House in 2016. Using a spatial Durbin model we estimate the effect of coal production on the Republicans vote share in the US Presidential Election of 2016 on the county level. To...

This document is a follow up to the paper by Ahmed and Pesaran (2020, AP) and reports state-level forecasts for the 2024 US presidential election. It updates the 3,107 county level data used by AP and uses the same machine learning techniques as before to select the variables used in forecasting...

Changes in political leadership drive sharp changes in public policy and partisan beliefs about the future. We exploit the surprise 2016 election of Trump to identify the effects of a shift in political power on one of the most consequential household decisions: whether to have a child....