measure connections between politicians and the universe of firms. To identify the causal effect of access to political power …

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

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 …

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework …, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings … that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings. -- Political competition ; outside …

The wage paid to politicians affects both the choice of citizens to run for an elective office and the performance of … sector, an increase in politicians' pay may change their mind. Second, if the reelection prospects of incumbents depend on … performance. Our results show that a higher wage attracts more educated candidates, and that better paid politicians size down the …

-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 …

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 …