This study examines whether the rally 'round the flag phenomenon is present in the context of terrorist attacks, and investigates the explanations for the related increase of confidence in political institutions and political approval of the incumbent's job performance. I exploit variations in...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the causal effect of immigrant presence on anti-immigrant votes is a short-run effect. For this purpose, we consider a distributed lag model and adapt the standard instrumental variable approach proposed by Altonji and Card (1991) to a dynamic...

The word “scapegoat” is defined as “a person made to bear the blame for others,” and similarly, “scapegoatism” refers to “the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself” (Collins English Dictionary and...

More democratic countries are often expected to fail at providing a fast, strong, and effective response when facing a crisis such as COVID-19. This could result in higher infections and more negative health effects, but hard evidence to prove this claim is missing for the new disease. Studying...

Since vaccination is the decisive factor for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to understand the process to vaccination success. We identify a variety of factors playing a crucial role including the availability of vaccines, pandemic pressures, economic strength (GDP),...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for proclimate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. This paper estimates causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling law...

In 1968, young people grew up in an atmosphere of strong dissatisfaction and distrust against the status quo. We show that higher exposure to protests in 1968 leads to higher dissatisfaction toward national governments and raises the probability of voting for populist parties. Consistently with...

This paper examines the impact of terrorism on voting behavior in the United States. We rely on an exhaustive list of terror attacks over the period 1970-2016 and exploit the inherent randomness of the success or failure of terror attacks to identify the political impacts of terrorism. We first...

Understanding the formation of trust at the individual level is a key issue given the impact that it has been recognized to have on economic development. Theoretical work highlights the role of the transmission of values such as trust from parents to their children. Attempts to empirically...

This study investigates the relationship between economic growth and democracy by estimating a nation’s production function specified as static and dynamic models using panel data. In estimating the production function, it applies a single time trend, multiple time trends and the general index...