For several decades now a debate has raged about policy-making by litigation. Spurred by the way in which tobacco, environmental, and other litigation has functioned as an alternative form of regulation, the debate asks whether policy-making or regulation by litigation is more or less socially...

The literature on congressional committees has largely overlooked the impact of jurisdictional fights on policy proposals and outcomes. This paper develops a theory of how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes. It shows why a)...

In this paper we demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected impact on firm stock prices. While it is understood that the government and firms have an important relationship, it remains difficult to determine which firms any given piece of legislation will affect, and...

A large literature has documented relationships between state clean indoor air laws (SCIALs) and smoking-related outcomes in the US. These laws vary within states over time and across venues such as schools, government buildings, and bars. Few studies, however, have evaluated whether the effects...

We evaluate the effects of the duration of legislative terms on the performance of legislators. We exploit a natural experiment in the Argentine House of Representatives where term lengths were assigned randomly. Results for various objective measures of legislative output show that longer terms...

This paper examines the relationship between the concentration of political power in legislative bargaining and the predictability of the process governing the recognition of legislators. Our main result establishes that, for a broad class of legislative bargaining games, if the recognition...

We develop a theory of taxation and the distribution of government spending in a citizen-candidate model of legislatures. Individuals are heterogeneous in two dimensions: productive ability in the private sector and negotiating ability in politics. When these are positively correlated, rich...

In this paper, we study the extent to which social connections influence the legislative effectiveness of members of the U.S. Congress. We propose a new model of legislative effectiveness that formalizes the role of social connections and generates simple testable predictions. The model predicts...

While the theoretical literature on non-cooperative legislative bargaining has grown voluminous, there is little empirical work attempting to test a key prediction in this literature: proposal power is valuable. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of...