election is safe for the incumbent (low competition) or if it is extremely fragile (high competition) then corruption is higher … results suggest that over-reliance on elections to discipline politicians is misplaced …

How can we motivate good politicians those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens' preferences to … enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. We find …

-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 …

politicians' quality is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design relying on the fact …

campaigns. We implemented a survey experiment during the (mixed gender) electoral race for mayor in Milan (2011), and a field … experiment during the (same gender) electoral race for mayor in Cava de' Tirreni (2015). In both cases, a sample of eligible …

that influence the probability of a vote being pivotal (election size and expected closeness of the election). These …

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework …, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings … into account the potential endogeneity of measures of political competition that depend on past election outcomes, we find …