states is often suspected to be marred by political haggling and corruption. Using rich administrative school-level panel … inspections. We also show that around election years, teachers spend more time on "non-teaching" activities. The political cycles …

identify in observational studies. In a large scale randomized trial conducted during an actual mayoral campaign in Italy, we … expose different areas of the polity to controlled informational treatments about the valence and ideology of the incumbent … elicited beliefs, we are able to structurally assess the relative weights voters place upon a candidate's valence and ideology …

geographical areas: incumbency increases turnout in the South of Italy, whereas we do not find any statistically significant effect …

improve the quality of politicians running for election …

that in Italy the wage of the mayor increases non-monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous …

regression discontinuity design in Italy, where cities above 15,000 inhabitants elect the mayor with a runoff system, while those …

The confirmation bias is a well-known form of motivated reasoning that serves to protect an individual from cognitive …. Because there is often systematic thought involved in generating the confirmation bias, deliberation tends to promote this … behavioral bias. Nevertheless, the importance of negative emotion in triggering the need for this bias is underappreciated. This …