What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

This paper characterizes the optimal advertising strategy of candidates in an election campaign, where groups of heterogeneous voters are targeted through media outlets. We discuss its effects on the implemented policy and relate it to the well-documented increase in polarization. Additionally,...

We use a field experiment to evaluate the impact of two informational get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns to boost female electoral participation in Paraguay. We find that public campaigns had no effect either on the probability of registration, or on voter turnout in the 2013 presidential...

We study how social proximity between the sender and the receiver of information shapes the effectiveness of preventive health campaigns. Focusing on shared religious affiliation as a signal of proximity, we implemented a field experiment during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in two...