Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

We examine the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on television on the body composition of adolescents as measured by percentage body fat (PBF) and to assess the sensitivity of these effects to using conventional measures of youth obesity based on body-mass index (BMI). We merge...

This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8...

We develop a model that nests previous explanations for women under-representation in positions of power. Focusing on democratic electoral dynamics, our framework delineates the three types of mechanisms that may be at play: consumer demand, candidate supply, and internal party dynamics beyond...

School accountability systems that establish the adoption of incentives for teachers and school managers usually impact positively students' performance. However, in many circumstances, school accountability systems may face institutional restrictions to establish rewards and sanctions to...

We analyze the impact of the quality of candidates running for a mayor position on turnout using a large data set on Italian municipal elections held from 1993 to 2011. We firstly estimate a municipal fixed effects model and show that an increase in the average quality of candidates competing at...

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility are smaller, because the...

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the short- and medium-term effects of gender quotas in candidate lists using evidence from Spain, where quotas were introduced in 2007 in municipalities with more than 5,000 inhabitants, and were extended in 2011 to municipalities with more than 3,000...

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...