We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...

Is electoral competition good for political selection? To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model where ideological parties select and allocate high-valence (experts) and lowvalence (party loyalists) candidates into electoral districts. Voters care about a national policy (e.g.,...

This paper investigates the differential response of male and female voters to competitive persuasion in political campaigns. During the 2011 municipal elections in Milan, a sample of eligible voters was randomly divided into three groups. Two were exposed to the same incumbent’s campaign but...

We study the patterns of political selection in majoritarian versus proportional systems. Political parties face a trade-off in choosing the mix of high and low quality candidates: high quality candidates are valuable to the voters, and thus help to win the elections, but they crowd out the...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates’ attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters’ types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

The wage paid to elected officials affects both the choice of citizens to run for office and the performance of those who are appointed. On the one hand, if skilled individuals shy away from politics because of higher opportunities in the private sector, an increase in politicians’ pay may...

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under runoff elections, the number of political candidates is larger, but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility are smaller, because the...

We evaluate the effect of relaxing fiscal rules on policy outcomes applying a quasiexperimental research design. In 1999 the Italian central government introduced fiscal rules aimed at imposing fiscal discipline on municipal governments, and in 2001 relaxed the rules for municipalities below...

We evaluate the impact of timing on decision outcome, when both the timing and the relevant decision are chosen under uncertainty. Betting markets provide the testing ground, as we exploit an original dataset containing more than one million online bets on games of the Italian Major Soccer...

We use a transparent statistical methodology for data-driven case studies—synthetic control methods to investigate the impact of economic liberalization episodes on the pattern of real per capita GDP in a worldwide sample of countries. Economic liberalizations are measured by a widely used...