We analyze the consequences of the decision of French government to maintain the first round of the municipal elections on March 15, 2020 on local excess mortality in the following weeks. We exploit heterogeneity across municipalities in voter turnout, which we instrument using a measure of the...

The goal of this paper is to study the impact of the lockdown policy on voting behaviour, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on France, where a differential lockdown was implemented across departments, based on the local diffusion of the disease. In particular, the country has been divided...

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the...

Maintaining economic output during COVID-19 pandemic can result in benefits for a firm's shareholders but comes at a potential cost to public health. Using novel retail store-level data, we examine how a CEO's political leanings, measured by political donations, impacts this tradeoff. We...