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

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 …

, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings …This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework … 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 … their in-office deeds, a higher wage may foster performance. We use data on all Italian municipal governments from 1993 to …

-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 …