-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 …

We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of election to political office on natural … governors and other political office holders live over one year longer than losers of close elections. The positive effects of … election appear in the mid-1800s, and grow notably larger when we restrict the sample to later years. We also analyze …

Italian municipal elections held from 1993 to 2011. We firstly estimate a municipal fixed effects model and show that an … politicians' quality is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design relying on the fact …

How can we motivate good politicians those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens' preferences to …

A large theoretical and empirical literature explores whether politicians and political parties change their policy … municipal election districts. To identify causal effects, we take advantage of large nonlinearities in the function which … assigns council seats, comparing otherwise similar elections where one party either barely wins or loses an additional seat …

data on personal votes in real elections with a web survey in which 2,513 non-Finnish respondents evaluated the facial … municipal and parliamentary elections and that they have a larger beauty premium in municipal, but not in parliamentary …, elections. As municipal candidates are relatively unknown, the beauty-premium gap indicates that voters ﾖ especially those to …

regression discontinuity afforded by close elections between women and men in India's state elections, we find that a woman … subsequent election. This stems mainly from an increased probability that previous women candidates contest again, an important … margin in India where a substantial number of incumbents do not contest re-election. There is no significant entry of new …