We explore the impact of fear on demand for government intervention. Our empirical strategy takes advantage of a unique quasi-experiment: During our survey in Russia, a very popular television program misreported the riskiness of the Covid-19 virus, thereby providing short-term exogenous...

We evaluate the impact of a recent reform that sharply increased the salaries of Italian local politicians on electoral competition and the valence attributes of the candidates elected. Exploiting misaligned election dates across Italian cities, we propose a novel methodology, the time-shifted...

Analyzing U.S. House elections (2002-2010), measures of legislators' effectiveness, and exogenous increases in Chinese import competition, we document a conditional relationship between legislative effectiveness and electoral success. In districts ex-posed to large trade shocks, incumbent...

We investigate whether climate activism favors pro-environmental consumption by examining the impact of Fridays for Future (FFF) protests in Italy on second-hand automobile sales in rallyaffected areas. Leveraging data on 10 million automobile transactions occurring before and after FFF...

"Pendular Voting" presents a novel two-stage voting procedure: A randomly chosen citizen group votes on a proposal replacing the status quo. Depending on the outcome, a "counterproposal" ensues, that is closer to/further away from the status quo than the original proposal. All citizens vote...

Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding...

This paper focuses on the political aspect of intergovernmental transfers in India. By using a balanced panel data-set comprising of data on 28 Indian states and Union Territories for the period 2003-2023 for both Legislative Assembly and Parliamentary elections at the state-level, the aim is to...

Based on annual observations of heavily polluting enterprises of A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2019, this paper analyzes the impact of officials' preference for enterprises' investment in environmental protection in the officials' hometowns. It is found that when the Secretary of the...

This paper examines the short- to long-term effects of large-scale refugee inflows on labour markets and anti-asylum attitudes. Using the exogenous arrival of Yugoslav refugees to Switzerland in the 1990s and municipal-level data with an instrumental variables strategy, we find that refugee...

Using a novel dataset in a difference-in-differences framework, I study the political implications of the change in policies protecting drought-impacted communities in Tunisia in 3088 districts. In 2016, the Tunisian government had drastically reduced support to farmers affected by droughts. I...