build up an original database on the personal background of 932 politicians who were at the head of the executive power in a …

The recent increase in the number of criminally accused politicians elected to state assemblies has caused much furor … that the cost of electing criminally accused politicians on measures of economic activity is quite large. Using estimates …

-ideological voters, who care about national and local policies, strongly prefer experts. We show that parties compete on good politicians … prediction. We find that politicians with higher ex-ante quality - as measured by years of schooling, previous market income, and …, the characteristics of politicians belonging to opposite parties converge to high-quality levels in close races …

-control, before-and-after discontinuity design to learn about the impact of female politicians in local elections. Our evidence is …

empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is … committed to the parliamentary activity in many respects, like voting attendance and bills sponsorship. -- Politicians ; moral …

politicians' rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using micro data for the mixed-member Italian House … areas and show lower absenteeism rates than their proportional colleagues. -- Electoral rule ; politicians ; targeted …

Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the quality of politicians for good government and consequently … politicians and perform competently in office becomes a central question. In this paper, we examine whether higher wages attract … better quality politicians and improve political performance using exogenous variation in the salaries' of local legislators …