Due to tightened safety regulation, some Italian soccer teams had to temporarily play home matches in empty stadiums in 2007. We exploit this event and find that referees exhibited home bias caused by social pressure when spectators were present.

In this paper, we return to the question raised in Dahlberg et al. (2012) concerning a causal relationship between ethnic diversity and preferences for redistribution. A re-analysis of their study indicates that results are based on an endogenous instrument and severe sample attrition bias....

This paper makes use of regression discontinuity designs to estimate the effect of the number of legislators on the size of government. The results indicate a negative effect, i.e., the larger the size of the legislature the smaller is the size of government. This runs counter to conventional...

In this brief comment, we return to the question raised in Dahlberg, Edmark and Lundqvist (2012) concerning a causal relationship between ethnic diversity and preferences for redistribution. A re-analysis of their study indicates that the results are based on a severe sample selection bias and...

This paper develops an empirical framework for the problem of soft budgets which is explicitly based on a dynamic commitment problem, i.e., the inability of a supporting organization to commit itself not to extend more resources ex post to a budget-constrained organization than it was prepared...

Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the size of legislature and the size of government. Those studies, however, do not adequately address the concerns of endogeneity. In contrast, this paper uses variation in legislature size induced by statutory council size...

In this paper, we provide evidence of whether child spacing affects the future success of children. As an exogenous source of variation in child spacing, we make use of the introduction of an administrative rule in the parental leave benefit system in Sweden. This rule made it possible for a...

This paper studies how social pressure affects the behavior of soccer referees. We make use of an attractive source of exogenous variation in the number of spectators at matches. Due to recent hooligan violence, the Italian government has implemented a regulation that forces some soccer teams to...

In this paper, we develop an empirical framework for detecting the existence and estimating the magnitude of the softness of a budget constraint. The defining feature of a soft budget constraint is a subordinate organization’s expectations of being bailed out by a superior organization in case...