Showing 171 - 180 of 186
The recent reform of the U.S. health care system has been described both as a boon and a death blow for the healthcare industry and for private insurers in particular. We exploit the surprise election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate, which dealt a serious blow to the prospects for...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008625944
We assemble a novel dataset of matched legislative and constituent votes and demonstrate that less income does not mean less representation. We show 1) The opinions of high and low income voters are highly correlated; the legislator's vote often reflects the desire of both. 2) What differences in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008855526
We document that trust in public institutions--and particularly trust in banks, business and government--has declined … over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in … the most suffered the biggest loss in confidence in institutions, particularly in trust in government and the financial …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008868169
What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists' main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008836707
Both conventional wisdom and leading academic research view pork barrel spending as antithetical to responsible policymaking in times of crisis. In this paper we present an alternative view. When agents are heterogeneous in their ideology and in their information about the economic situation,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008784918
We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008628348
We examine how special interests, measured by campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, and constituent interests, measured by the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district, may have influenced U.S. government policy toward the housing sector during the subprime mortgage...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008631088
The standard theoretical solution to the observation of substantial turnout in large elections is that individuals receive utility from the act of voting. However, this leaves open the question of whether or not there is a significant margin on which individuals consider the effect of their vote...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008634674
We study which policy tool and at what level a majority chooses in order to reduce activities with negative externalities. We consider three instruments: a rule, that sets an upper limit to the activity which produces the negative externality, a quota that forces a proportional reduction of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008674237
Conventional wisdom and empirical academic research conclude that majority Black districts decrease Black representation by increasing conservatism in Congress. However, this research generally suffers from three limitations: 1) too low a level of aggregation 2) lack of a counterfactual and 3)...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009025245