We examine whether economic and military competence of political leaders affect their duration in office. We introduce leader heterogeneity in the selectorate theory of Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and derive the hypothesis that in the presence of a revolutionary threat, economic competence...

Can political leaders change constituents' beliefs? If so, is it rhetoric, identity, or the interaction of the two that matters? We construct a large-scale experiment where participants are exposed to anti-immigrant and pro-immigrant speeches from both Presidents Obama and Trump. We benchmark...

In this paper we model the interaction between leaders, their followers and crowd followers in a coordination game with local interaction. The steady states of a dynamic best-response process can feature a coexistence of Pareto dominant and risk dominant actions in the population. The existence...

Individual leaders have been central to the transformation of political institutions, organizations and many instances of social and economic reform. Why are some leaders able to take advantage of opportunities to successfully catalyze large-scale change while others fail? In this paper we argue...

We study whether leaders influence the unethical conduct of followers. To avoid selection issues present in natural environments, we use a laboratory experiment in which we form groups and assign leadership roles at random. We study an environment in which groups compete, with dishonest behavior...

This paper studies the efficiency of decentralized leadership in federations where selfish regional governments provide regional and federal public goods and the benevolent central government implements interregional earmarked and income transfers. Without residential mobility, unlimited...

We present a new mechanism to explain politically induced changes in bilateral aid. We argue that shifts in the foreign policy alignment between a donor and a recipient country arising from leadership changes induce reallocation of development aid. Utilizing data from the G7 and 133 developing...

We investigate the link between leadership, beliefs and pro-social behavior. This link is interesting because field evidence suggests that people's behavior in domains like charitable giving, tax evasion, corporate culture and corruption is influenced by leaders (CEOs, politicians) and beliefs...

Companies increasingly shift from hierarchical to team-based organizational structures. Scholars and practitioners alike have emphasized the potential of leadership to foster performance in these settings. However, the causal impact of leadership is difficult to identify, as in agile and...

This paper examines leadership in relation to supplying a global public good. Both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement encourage the developed countries to take a lead in reducing emissions. Does a country benefit from taking a lead? When does leadership improve global welfare? The answer...