At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

At the start of their term, politicians often announce which issue they intend to address. To shed light on this agenda setting, we develop a model in which a politician has to decide whether or not to address a public issue. Addressing an issue means that the politician investigates the issue...

I analyze Dutch panel data that contains rich information on voting, political opinions, and personality traits. I show that "adversarial" preferences - competitiveness, negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness - are strong predictors of right-wing and populist political preferences....

In the Netherlands, an immediate baby boom followed the end of WWII and the baby bust of the 1930s. I propose a novel application of the bunching methodology to examine whether the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women's completed fertility. I disaggregate the number of births by...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

In a democracy, a political majority can influence both the corporategovernance structure and the return to human and financial capital.We argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently diffused, thereis political support for a strong governance role for dispersed equitymarket investors, and...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

This paper tests the policitcal dimensions of the presidential cycle effect in U.S. financial markets. The presidential cycle effect states that average stock market returns are significantly higher in the last two years compared to the first two years of a presidential term. We confirm the...