We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and...

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunificationof East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidenceof the importance of market access for economic development. In line with a standard neweconomic geography model, we find that...

In response to recent work on the aggregation of individual judgments on logicallyconnected propositions into collective judgments, it is often asked whether judgmentaggregation is a special case of Arrowian preference aggregation. We argue the op-posite. After proving a general impossibility...

This paper explores a wide range of cross-country determinants of life satisfaction exploiting adatabase of 90,000 observations in 70 countries. We distinguish four groups of aggregate variablesas potential determinants of satisfaction: political, economic, institutional, and human...

The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during anelectoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefsabout parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferent about thecandidates attach little value to information because they perceive...

In the theory of judgment aggregation on logically connected propositions, an important question remains open: Which aggregation rules are manipulable and which are strategy-proof? We define manipulability and strategy-proofness in judgment aggregation, characterize all strategy-proof...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distributionof federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve onprevious work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that areDemocrats, Republicans, and...

This paper studies determinants of MPs expense claims in Parliament using the datareleased under the freedom of information act in 2004. Using a multiple regressionframework, we correlate expenses with three sets of variables: constituencycharacteristics, party affiliation and individual...

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation ofindividual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formalwork on the transformation of individual judgments in group deliberation. Idevelop a model of judgment transformation and prove a...

This paper explores the logic of …scal restraints in a political agencymodel with both moral hazard and adverse selection. The role of thepolitical process is both to discipline incumbents who may act againstthe public interest and to sort in those politicians who are most likelyact in...