We study vote trading among U.S. Congress members. By tracking roll-call votes within bills across five legislatures and politicians' personal connections made during the school years, we document a propensity of connected legislators to vote together that depends on how salient the bill is to...

Adequate wages are an important tool to shield public officials from special interests and corruption. But what is the equilibrium effect of higher wages in the presence of criminal pressure groups, who use both bribes and violence? By means of a regression discontinuity design, we show that an...

This paper develops a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium, in a setting without takeovers and controlling shareholders. A voting premium emerges when a minority blockholder tries to influence the composition of the shareholder base by accumulating votes and buying...

How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We...

We study how negative sentiment around an industry impacts beliefs and behaviors, focusing on demands for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd and the salience of the "defund the police" movement. We assess stakeholder beliefs on the impact of protests on the stock prices of...

Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling...

This paper analyzes the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the total provision of public goods in a framework in which consumers who may make such voluntary contributions to public goods via CSR are also voters who decide on the level of taxes to finance publicly provided public...

Open access, competitive exploitation can be incredibly damaging to valuable resources and the human populations that depend upon them. Even though wealth, resource rents and stocks are at stake, open access often seems to be ineffectively addressed across time and space. Institutions vary....

This paper studies the long-run effects of government-led construction of manufacturing plants on the regions where they were built and on individuals from those regions. Specifically, we examine publicly financed plants built in dispersed locations outside of major urban centers for security...

There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is...