We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

Efforts to increase female political representation are often thought to be at odds with meritocracy. This paper develops a theoretical framework and an empirical analysis to examine this idea. We show how the survival concerns of a mediocre male party leadership can create incentives for gender...

This paper evaluates the impact of relocations of public employment across cities on private sector activity. To identify the effect of changes in public employment on the private sector, we exploit the relocation of the German Federal Government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second...

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...

A key prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that the location of economic activity is not necessarily determined by fundamentals. To test the empirical relevance of these ideas requires a natural experiment in which a large but ultimately temporary shock dislocates economic...

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic...

Preferential voting has been introduced in a number of proportional election systems over the last 20 years, mainly as a means to increase the accountability of individual politicians. But most of these reforms have been criticized as blatant failures. In this paper, we discover a genuinely new...

We estimate the effect of political regime transitions on growth with semi-parametric methods, combining difference in differences with matching, that have not been used in macroeconomic settings. Our semi-parametric estimates suggest that previous parametric estimates may have seriously...

We revisit the optimal-contract approach to the design of monetary institutions, in the light of the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) on interest rates and the resort to Quantitative Easing (QE) in recent years. Four of our lessons have not yet been incorporated in the practices of inflation targeting...

Using highly granular micro data, we document very divergent economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Swedish private-sector firms and their workers. Firms that exported to, or imported from, heavily afflicted countries reduced their output due to disrupted trade. Service firms that operated...