Previous research has established that good-looking political candidates win more votes. We extend this line of research by examining differences between parties on the left and on the right of the political spectrum. Our study combines data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on who wants to be a politician. We take advantage of a considerable 35 percent salary increase of Finnish MPs in the year 2000, intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive. A difference-indifferences analysis, using...

This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a...

We study the role of beauty in politics. For the first time, focus is put on differences in how women and men evaluate female and male candidates and how different candidate traits relate to success in real and hypothetical elections. We have collected 16,218 assessments by 2,772 respondents of...

We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anti-corruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

We estimate the effect of getting elected on future income development of political candidates. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness, which can be used to implement a regression discontinuity design in any electoral system. We apply the method to the Finnish...

How can the regularization of approximately half a million migrant's impact crime reports in hosting areas? To identify the effects of this large amnesty, we match confidential administrative data on the location of undocumented migrants with department-monthly data from crime reports and...

We exploit the quasi-random settlement of refugees in Sweden between 1985 and 1994 to examine the characteristics of individuals showing a disproportionate negative response to migration flows and whether these responses differ when the arrival of refugees occurred concurrently with economic...

How does easing the economic integration of forced migrants affect native voting behaviors in the Global South? This paper assesses how the regularization of half a million Venezuelan forced migrants affected the electoral choices of Colombian natives by comparing election results in...

Can online experiences that illustrate the perspective of the everyday life of a minority group improve behaviors of the dominant towards the minority group? We explore the case of natives and refugees by randomly assigning 850 natives to: i) an online game that immerses natives in the life...